Forwarding Programming in Protocol-Oblivious Instruction Set

Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) is an enhancement to Open Flow-based SDN forwarding architecture. In this paper, we proposed a basic POF Flow Instruction Set (POF-FIS) which can be used to edit and forward packets as designed on the controller side. Working on the southbound interface of SDN, POF-FIS is independent of target platforms and northbound interfaces. To design the forwarding process on the controller side, users can take advantages of high-level programming languages or directly manipulate the POF-FIS using graphical or command-line user interface. High-speed execution of POF-FIS is very important for network elements, while eliminating the need of hard-coded protocol parsing and packet processing. We show that POF-FIS allows the forwarding capability of the flexible network elements to be fully released to achieve higher performance and more expressive forwarding behavior.