Design and Demonstration of SDN-Based Flexible Flow Converging with Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF)

With the development of software-defined networking (SDN), people start to realize that the protocol-dependent nature of OpenFlow, i.e., the matching fields are defined according to existing network protocols (e.g., Ethernet and IP), will limit the programmability of forwarding plane and cause scalability issues. In this work, we focus on Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) [1], which can make the forwarding plane reconfigurable, programmable and future-proof with a protocol-independent instruction set. We design and implement a POF-based flexible flow converging (F-FC) scheme to reduce the number of flow-entries for enhanced scalability. To evaluate the POF system experimentally, we build a network testbed that consists of both commercial and software-based POF switches. Network experiments with real-time video streaming in the proposed POF system demonstrate that our POF-based F-FC approach can outperform conventional schemes.