A novel floodless service discovery mechanism designed for Software-Defined Networking

The low-cost, self-configuration capability and "plug-and-play" feature of Ethernet establishes its dominant position in the local area networks (LAN). However, it is hard to extend to large scale because of the legacy broadcast-based service discovery mechanism. Therefore, to solve this problem, a new split network architecture named Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is introduced in this paper, and a novel floodless service discovery mechanism (FSDM) for SDN is designed. For the FSDM, the widespread broadcast messages for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) are considered especially, respectively. Then the DHCP relay and ARP proxy are proposed to handle DHCP broadcast messages and ARP broadcast messages, respectively. The proposed FSDM in this paper can eliminate flooding completely, reserve the auto-configuration characteristics. Particularly, there is no need to change the existing hardware, software and protocols of hosts for the proposed scheme. Finally, the simulation results are demonstrated to show that our proposed model allows redundant links existed in network and has the property of scalability, which can significantly reduce network traffic in data plane and control traffic in control plane, and decrease the overhead of control plane.