ConForm: estabelecimento autônomo de fluxos de controle In-Band com descoberta de topologia integrada para redes SDN

Abstract

From the very beginning, the research in the SDN area has been concentrated upon exploring possibilities and evolve control plane programmability. This was due to the separation of control and data plane and the extreme simplification of data plane functionalities. Only recently, research revealed several limitations related to data plane. As a consequence, begin to emerge several proposals to improve data plane programmability and flexibility. On the other hand, questions related to autonomic networking continues to evolve as a design target to SDN. In this sense, foreseeing that future networks will be fully programmable at both control and data planes, to support challenge management functions, this work presents a new protocol to self-establishment of in-band control flows integrated to topology discovery to SDN-based networks. The protocol has been formally specified and the analytical model created shows that the proposed protocol has overhead similar to de-facto protocols used to topology discovery in OpenFlow-based SDN networks. Finally, a simulation developed in OMNeT++ platform demonstrated the protocol performance and scalability in terms of the network size.