OpenFlow transparent custom action extension by using Packet-In and click packet processing
Shogo Ando, Akihiro Nakao · 2016
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that controls network by using software. OpenFlow switches have predefined actions to be executed by the controller, but if any undefined actions need to be executed on given packets, they are transferred to the controller by the exception mechanism called Packet-In and processed there. When we execute undefined custom actions with Packet-In on the controller, there are three problems. (1) concentration of Packet-In messages, (2) latency of Packet-In message transfer and (3) incompatibility among controller frameworks. In this paper, we propose OpenFlow Click Action Extension (OFCAE), which provides sharing custom actions among various controller frameworks with low latency while keeping the compatibility with the OpenFlow architecture. We introduce Packet-In Proxy, which implements local Packet-In processing within the switch to alleviate the concentration of Packet-In messages. Furthermore, we propose Packet-In Of-floader to perform custom packet processing for Packet-In Proxy. We implement and evaluate the prototype of our proposed system and show a case of custom actions.