The power of software-defined networking: line-rate content-based routing using OpenFlow

Abstract

A lot of research effort has been invested to support efficient content-based routing. Nevertheless, practitioners often fall back to far less expressive communication paradigms like multicast groups. The benefits of content-based routing in minimizing bandwidth consumption are often rendered useless by simpler communication paradigms that rely on line-rate processing of data packets at the switches of the network providers. Contrary content-based routing protocols face the inherent overhead in matching the content of events against subscriptions leading to far lower throughput rates and higher end-to-end delays. However, recent trends in networking such as software defined networking in combination with network virtualization have tremendous potential to change the picture. In our opinion this will significantly increase acceptance of sophisticated middleware like content-based routing in the future. To support our claims we outline in this paper a reference architecture that may be used to build middleware for Future Internet applications. Furthermore, we provide a solution for realizing content-based routing at line-rate relying on this reference architecture and illustrate research problems that need to be addressed.