Flow-level State Transition as a New Switch Primitive for SDN

摘要

Software-defined networking has changed networking by separating the control plane from the data plane. While there have been many innovations on the controller applications for different network management needs, most of these applications still rely on flow-based rules in the data plane. These flow-based rules often match on multiple packet header fields (e.g., source/destination IP addresses), take predefined actions on the matching packets (e.g., dropping the packet, forwarding it to an outgoing port), or maintain counters (e.g., the number of packets or bytes).