Application-aware data plane processing in SDN

A key benefit of Software Defined Networks is fine-grained management of network flows made possible by the execution of flow-specific actions based upon inspection and matching of various packet fields. However, current switches and protocols limit the inspected fields to layer 2-4 headers and hence any customized flow-handling that uses higher-layer information necessitates sending the packets to the controller. This is inefficient and slow, adding several switch-to-controller round-trip delays. This paper proposes an extended SDN architecture that enables fast customized packet-handling even when the information used is not restricted to L2-L4. We describe an implementation of this architecture that keeps most of the processing in the data plane and limits the need to send packets to the controller even when higher-layer information is used in packet-handling. We show how some popular applications can be implemented using this extended architecture and evaluate the performance of one such application using a prototype implementation on Open vSwitch. The results show that the proposed architecture has low overhead, good performance and can take advantage of a flexible scale-out design for application deployment.