Research On High-Performance Protocol-Independent Forwarding Data Plane Under Sdn

Software-Defined Networking(SDN)separates the control plane and data plane in the network forwarder,and proposes the concept of programmable control plane,which greatly improves the flexibility of the network.However,the current SDN architecture still lacks flexibility and scalability,and cannot flexibly support developer-defined protocols.When the new protocol is proposed,it takes a lot of time to design and develop.To some extent,the proposal of POF and P4 solves the above problems.But there are still some problems,such as complex and inefficient controller operation,rigid entry-matching,and poor software forwarding performance.In order to solve the above problems,this thesis carried out a detailed study on the data plane.We designed and developed a high-performance protocol-independent forwarding system under SDN.First,this thesis designs and implements a SDN southbound protocol that supports protocol-independent forwarding,to solve the problem of complex and inefficient controller operations.We abstract the protocol specifications and flow entries,add related message types,add some decoupled actions from the protocol,and redesign the southbound packet-processing module.Based on the southbound protocol,developers can simply manage developer-defined protocols and flow entries through the interface provided by the SDN controller.There is no need to recompile and configure,making full use of the SDN controller.Secondly,this paper designs and implements a high-performance protocol-independent forwarding module.It includes a field-analysis module,an entry-matching module,and an action-execution module.Each module is decoupled from the protocol and cooperates with the southbound protocol.The flow entry supports any combination of match fields.And it's designed with multiple levels and sub-table,which reduces the number of entries and improves the matching efficiency.At the same time,we use DPDK technology to optimize the forwarder,which improves the efficiency of packet forwarding.Finally,we do some tests about the function and performance of the system.The experimental results show that the protocol and flow entry can be flexibly configured by the controller,and the entry-matching function is more flexible.In addition,the performance of software forwarder with DPDK is much higher than that of POF switches and Bmv2 of P4.Its PPS is about 14 times higher than that of POF switches,and about 5 times higher than Bmv2.Therefore,on the basis of decoupling the data plane from the protocol,the forwarding system proposed in this thesis effectively solves the problems of POF and P4,and implements high-performance protocol-independent forwarding under SDN.