An inter-AS routing component for software-defined networks

Network management is a challenging problem of wide impact with many enterprises suffering significant monetary losses, that can be of millions per hour, due to network issues, as downtime cost. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) approach is a new paradigm that enables the management of networks with low cost and complexity. The SDN architecture consists of a control plane, a forwarding plane and a protocol that enables communication with both planes. The control plane is composed by an Operating System and applications that run on top of it. The forwarding plane contains the switches, routers, and other network equipment. Nowadays, inter-domain routing system presents some critical problems, mainly due to its fully distributed model. Recent research has showed that it would be beneficial to apply the SDN approach to address some of those problems. But it became necessary to build a new mechanism to allow inter-domain routing using SDN. The aim of this paper is to present an inter-domain routing solution using a NOX-OpenFlow architecture, based on some characteristics of the today largely used inter-domain protocol, keeping the SDN architectural principles. Although NOX-OpenFlow was originally created for routing only in enterprise networks, we propose routing beyond those, lifting this undesirable restriction of the original architecture. Our tests show that the built of this kind of application provides a much less complex, less prone to errors, and scalable solution.