NEA: arquitetura de elemento de rede SDN com suporte a MAC definido pela aplicação

Abstract

The Internet has become a limiting factor for its evolution. Applications are being developed from a new perspective, demanding Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). Approaches that aim to redesign the architecture, e.g., Software Defined Networks (SDN), have become popular in the computer networks field to minimize the TCP/IP limitations. In theory, SDN Networks naturally leave all flexibility and programmability of the network to the control plane, neglecting the ability of the data plane to provide QoS and QoE. As a result, the technologies commonly used in data plane solutions often resort to legacy platforms to materialize the forwarding policies. Although those technologies enable reconfiguring the network element's behavior, the MAC remains the same. This work aims at the specification and development of a network element architecture (NEA) and a prototype of a Switch with MAC driven by application for SDN networks. The NEA architecture proposed in this thesis, compared with other similar approaches, can expose, through the fine-grained, the logic referring to low-level forwarding policies to the control plane through an orchestrator module, allowing (re)programming in a systematic and fast way. The results obtained show the ability of Switch NEA to improve QoS, through the accurate control of forwarding rules in the data plane and the ability to handle different data flows through the same physical port, assigning parameters like priority and bandwidth to other streams. It is also worth mentioning the possibility of adding new functionalities and support for new protocols.