Protocol-oblivious forwarding: unleash the power of SDN through a future-proof forwarding plane

By Haoyu Song. HotSDN '13, 2013

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A flexible and programmable forwarding plane is essential to maximize the value of Software-Defined Networks (SDN). In this paper, we propose Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) as a key enabler for highly flexible and programmable SDN. Our goal is to remove any dependency on protocol-specific configurations on the forwarding elements and enhance the data-path with new stateful instructions to support genuine software defined networking behavior. A generic flow instruction set (FIS) is defined to fulfill this purpose. POF helps to lower network cost by using commodity forwarding elements and to create new value by enabling numerous innovative network services. We built both hardware-based and open source software-based prototypes to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of POF. We report the preliminary evaluation results and the insights we learnt from the experiments. POF is future-proof and expressive. We believe it represents a promising direction to evolve the OpenFlow protocol and the future SDN forwarding elements.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e44a8e99cc9c5d999297b9f0edd0be58f16e75d

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Time-slotted software-defined Industrial Ethernet for real-time Quality of Service in Industry 4.0 (2019, neutral): “The communication channel between the controller and the switch uses the POF protocol [25].”
NFV and SDN—Key Technology Enablers for 5G Networks (2017, background): “Key works in this context are Protocol Independent Forwarding (PIF/P4) [22], Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF) [23] or Deeply Programmable Networks (DPN) [24].”
5G network slicing using SDN and NFV- A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges (2019, methodology): “control channel bottleneck and pro- cessing delay imposed between the SDN controller and switches [105] . Thanks to the advanced switch interface technologies such as OpenState [106] , P4 [107] , POF [108] , Stateful Data Plane Ar- chitecture (SDPA) [109] and SNAP [110] that provide enhanced statefu”
A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Software Defined Networking (SDN): Research Issues and Challenges (2019, methodology): “There exist other less popular proposals such as OVSDB [32], ForCES [33], Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) [34], NETCONF [35], LISP [36], OpFlex [37] and OpenState [38].”
Programmable Packet Scheduling at Line Rate (2016, background): “Recent research into programmable parsers [23], fast programmable switch pipelines [17], and languages to program them [16, 40], coupled with recent multi-Tbit/s programmable commercial chips [1, 11] suggests that change might be afoot.”
Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs): A Comprehensive Survey (2015, background): “A similar forwarding mechanism, Protocol-oblivious Forwarding (PoF) has been proposed by Huawei Technologies [60].”