Enhancing OpenFlow actions to offload packet-in processing

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) increasingly attracts more researchers as well as industry attentions. Open-Flow as a major API for SDN applies <;match, action> rules to every packet. However, it only supports a few actions that are all predefined. We extend this limitation of OpenFlow and propose User-Defined Actions (UDAs) for SDN. We discuss usecases of UDAs and propose an architecture to realize UDAs. Using our architecture we conduct a series of tests. We indicate that our UDAs can elevate millisecond-scale running time of current proposals to nanosecond-scale (including proposals from northbound applications of SDN community and virtual appliances of Network Function Virtualization or NFV community). Also, regarding ease of programmability, we show that our proposal decrease the lines of code of by 72.9% and 79.3% compared to implementing the same functionality as a northbound application and as a standalone middlebox, respectively. In addition, we extended OpenFlow to support UDAs and implemented a few sample UDAs.