SFA: Stateful Forwarding Abstraction in SDN Data Plane

Authors: 

Shuyong Zhu, Jun Bi, and Chen Sun, Tsinghua University

Abstract: 

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture where network control is decoupled from forwarding and is directly programmable. However, existing techniques provide limited support for stateful forwarding in SDN data plane. Relying on the controller for all state maintaining gives rise to scalability and performance issues. In this paper, we present Stateful Forwarding Abstraction (SFA) in SDN data plane. And we design a co-processing unit in SDN switches named Forwarding Processor (FP). It can deal with state infor-mation in data plane and its instructions can be flexibly extended to meet application requirements. Through SFA, we implement stateful network processing on the datapath which covers a full range of Layer 4 to Layer 7 services. We validate its performance based on IPsec. The experiment result proves that the forwarding effi-ciency is greatly improved.

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@inproceedings {182261,
author = {Shuyong Zhu and Jun Bi and Chen Sun},
title = {{SFA}: Stateful Forwarding Abstraction in {SDN} Data Plane},
booktitle = {Open Networking Summit 2014 (ONS 2014)},
year = {2014},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/ons2014/technical-sessions/presentation/zhu},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
Download
Zhu PDF