A Low-cost, High-Efficiency SDN Framework to Diminish Redundant ARP and IGMP Traffics in Large-Scale LANs
You‐Chiun Wang, Han Hu · 2018
Ethernet is the predominant protocol in the data-link layer of wired networks. It works based on the concept of broadcast domain by using switches to connect hosts, which means that every host in a local area network (LAN) will receive packets sent from other nodes. Thus, Ethernet's performance inevitably degrades when LAN scale grows, as the LAN will be congested by superfluous packets due to broadcast. Moreover, Ethernet switches cannot support multicast protocols but realize them by also broadcasting packets, which worsens the situation. To solve the broadcast problem, we develop a low-cost, high-efficiency framework based on software defined network (SDN), which aims to diminish redundant traffics produced by the address resolution protocol (ARP) and the Internet group management protocol (IGMP). Through simulations by Mininet, we show that our SDN framework not only greatly reduces broadcast packets in Ethernet but also significantly saves the controller's cost as comparing with other SDN-based methods. In addition, the proposed framework is also implemented in our campus network to show its effectiveness.