Concise Encoding of Flow Attributes in SDN Switches
Robert MacDavid, Rüdiger Birkner, Ori Rottenstreich, Arpit Kumar Gupta, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford · 2017
Network devices such as routers and switches forward traffic based on entries in their local forwarding tables. Although these forwarding tables conventionally make decisions based on a packet header field such as a destination address, tagging flows with sets or sequences of attributes and making forwarding decisions based on these attributes can enable richer network policies. For example, devices at the edge of a network could add a tag to each packet that encodes a set of egress locations, a set of host permissions, or a sequence of middleboxes to traverse; simpler devices in the core of the network could then forward packets based on this tag.