LISP: a southbound SDN protocol?

The Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) splits current IP addresses overlapping semantics of identity and location into two separate names-paces. Since its inception the protocol has gained considerable attention from both industry and academia, motivating several new use cases to be proposed. Despite its inherent control-data decoupling and the abstraction and flexibility it introduces into the network, little has been said about the role of LISP on the SDN paradigm. In this article we try to fill that gap and analyze if LISP can be used for SDN. The article presents a systematic analysis of the relevant SDN requirements and how such requirements can be fulfilled by the LISP architecture and components. This results in a set of benefits (e.g. incremental deployment, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, and inter-domain support) and drawbacks (e.g. extra headers and some initial delay) of using LISP for SDN. In order to validate the analysis, we have built and tested a prototype using the LISPmob open-source implementation.