Lightweight Automatic Discovery Protocol for OpenFlow-Based Software Defined Networking

摘要

In Software Defined Networking (SDN), it is crucial for the controller to manage the data plane and provide basic services with creating and maintaining a real-time abstract topology view for the application plane. Currently, most serious challenge for the topology discovery services is the efficiency of the topology discovery protocol. In this letter, we propose an automatic topology discovery protocol to collect and update the topology information efficiently and securely, which is without unnecessary modifications on the standard OpenFlow protocol or extra hardware logic on switches. We also design a novel probe frame structure for the proposed protocol to reduce the traffic overhead and the controller burden. Finally, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated for its efficiency, security, and scalability. The experimental results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the state-of-the-art OpenFlow-based topology discovery protocols.