Open Web: Seamless Proxy Interconnection at the Switching Layer

The Internet was designed around the end-to-end principle, mimicking in many ways the architecture of the old telephone network: services were accessed by naming the specific end-host offering the service. The demands of robustness, performance, and ubiquitous low latency for a worldwide population have led to an architecture where the names of services are largely symbolic, and do not name specific hosts or locations. Traffic is redirected onto a service network through the use of proxies. A typical example is a web proxy. Currently, proxies are generally accessed through layer 4-7 scripts and commands, such as the route command on Posix systems and, usually, manual configuration or Javascript code for a web proxy. This process is tedious and error-prone, and far from robust. New open protocols at the switching layer (layer 2) now enable far more robust and seamless packet redirection, without need for user configuration or unreliable scripts. In this paper, we describe Openweb, a layer-2 redirection engine implemented as an application of the Open flow switch architecture.