Efficient routing for middlebox policy enforcement in software-defined networking

摘要

Network applications require traffic to sequence through multiple types of middleboxes to enhance network functions, e.g., providing security and guaranteeing performance. Sequenced-middlebox policy routing on top of regular layer 2/3 flow routing is challenging to be flexibly managed by network administrators. In addition, various types of middlebox resources concurrently obtained by numerous applications complicate network-resource management. Furthermore, middlebox failures can lead to a lack of security and the malfunction of entire network. In this paper, we formulate a mixed-integer linear programming problem to achieve a network load-balancing objective in the context of sequenced-middlebox policy routing. Our global routing approach manages network resources efficiently by simplifying candidate path selections, balancing the entire network and using the simulated annealing algorithm. Moreover, in case of middlebox failures, we design a fast recovery mechanism by exploiting the remaining link and middlebox resources locally. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to handle failures in sequenced-middlebox scenarios using OpenFlow. Finally, we implement proposed routing approaches on Mininet testbed and evaluate experiments' scalability, assessing the effectiveness of the approaches. Results of the optimization on a test topology include an increase up to 26.4% of the throughput with respect to a sequenced shortest-path routing. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.