LabelCast: A General Abstraction for the Forwarding Plane of SDN
LV Gao · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2012
In the evolution of Internet,it is very hard to test and deploy new network protocols in production networks for researchers,SDN based on Openflow tries to provide a feasible way.Openflow implements flows forwarding based on multiple tables by multiple pipelines,while Openflow does not describe the ability of computing and storing within networks,which could not support content-centric networks.To enhance the scalability of SDN,a general Abstraction of the forwarding layer,LabelCast,is proposed,which maps network addresses to fixed-length labels and characterizes the ability of forwarding operations and processing functions with Label and Cast tables.Forwarding layer lookups based on fixed-length labels and schedules services,including light-semantics instructions of general forwarding operations,and network protocol semantics or status-related processing functions arranged by the Cast table,which could be extended to support the complexity processing of new networks.LabelCast supports end-to-end forwarding based on flows and non-end-to-end forwarding in content or information centric network architectures,which supplies a general Abstraction layer for SDN.