Implementation and evaluation of the mobilityfirst protocol stack on software-defined network platforms

This thesis presents the results of an experimental study aimed at implementing the MobilityFirst protocol stack on Software-Defined Network platforms. The MobilityFirst protocol involves a novel hybrid name/address routing procedure. Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs), which are host names, are first resolved by a Global Name Resolution Service (GNRS) into routable network addresses, which are then used by the routers to forward data. It also has support for enhanced network services using in-network storage and compute. These features have been implemented in an SDN using controller software that learns about the GUIDs and sets up MobilityFirst flows using VLAN tags. The prototype implementation has been done using the Floodlight controller and OpenFlow 1.0 switches. The Floodlight controller has been extended by adding modules that analyze MobilityFirst packets and set up corresponding flows. The prototype has been evaluated by conducting performance experiments on both the control plane and the data plane. Results show that the average processing time at the controller is of the order of 100?s and the data plane throughput for GUID forwarded traffic reaches 800Mbps for mega byte sized chunks. The experiments also highlight potential performance bottlenecks of SDN/OpenFlow networks.