Toward manageable middleboxes in software‐defined networking

Abstract

Software‐defined networking (SDN) acts as a centralized management unit, especially in a network with devices that operate under the transport layer of the OSI model. However, when a network with layer 7 middleboxes (MBs) is considered, current SDNs exhibit limitations. As such, to achieve a real‐centralized management unit, a new architecture is required that decouples the data and control planes of all network devices. In this report, we propose such a complementary architecture to the current SDN in which SDN‐enabled MBs are included along with contemporary SDN‐enabled switches. The management unit of this architecture improves network performance and reduces routing cost by considering the status of the MBs during flow forwarding. This unit consists of the following two parts: an SDN controller (SDNC) and a middlebox controller (MBC). The latter selects the best MBs for each flow and the former determines the best path according to its routing algorithm and provides information via the MBC. The results show that the proposed architecture improved performance because the utilization of all network devices including MBs is manageable.

Middlebox selection optimization via an intelligent framework in software‐defined networking

“…In other words, optimized MB selection is not being considered in current routing methods. The result of our previous work 13 proves that considering the device's status in routing improves network performance. Thus, in this article, we consider CPU, BW, and RAM usage of network devices as essential parameters of dynamic routing and device selection.…”

“…The fourth script is the server.py that listens to the clients' requests on predefined ports. We have run our emulations on a system with a Core i7 2630QM @ 2.00 GHz processor and 8 GB of RAM 42 . As discussed earlier, our network has only one policy (P1 = Host‐IDS‐Server ).…”

“…Such a SDN architecture is presented in our previous work 13 . In this architecture, the control unit has a global view of all network devices.…”

Software-Defined Networks for Optical Networks Using Flexible Orchestration: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…Even though SDNs present an innovative framework for designing optical networks, their primary aim is to provide network control for standard networks by separating the control plane from the data plane, and SDN technology helps to initialize, track, alter, and control network behaviour through open interfaces and representation of lower-level functionality. Since its inception in 2011, the OpenFlow protocol [24], which is a major protocol used in software-defined networks, communicates with network plane components [25] and, irrespective of the distance, decides how packets should be sent over a network switch [26]. e roots of software-defined networking can be traced back to the year 1995, and sixteen years later, Sun Microsystems released "Java Open Networking Foundation (OFN)," which was used in 2011 to expedite SDN and OpenFlow.…”

Software-Defined Networks for Optical Networks using Flexible Orchestration : Advances, Challenges and Opportunities

“…Since its inception in 2011. The OpenFlow protocol [27], which is a major protocol used in software-defined networks, communicates with network plane components [28] and irrespective of the distance, decides how packets should be sent over a network switch [29].…”