OpenRouteFlow: Enable Legacy Router as a Software-Defined Routing Service for Hybrid SDN

Hybrid SDN is an important direction for the evolution of SDN. It is one of the challenges to be addressed for hybrid SDN to open the legacy router and enable the routing view as a software defined routing service. In this paper, OpenRouteFlow is presented, which opens legacy routing protocols and flow sampling information as a routing view service for network applications by software update. OpenRouteFlow tries to realize the decoupling of network visualization and network control. It provides path-oriented and traffic-oriented subscription and publication services for different scenarios of network control. In a hybrid network consisted of OpenFlow switches and legacy routers, OpenRouteFlow is able to map OpenFlow control rules into ACL or RIB in order to support flexible software defined capacities in legacy routers.