FSDM: Floodless service discovery model based on Software-Defined Network

Ethernet plays the dominant role in the local area networks (LAN) because of its low-cost, self-configuration capability and “plug-and-play” feature. However, it is hard to extend to large scale because of the legacy broadcast-based service discovery model. For example, users acquire necessary network configuration information (e.g. IP address, subnet mask, default gateway) automatically relying on broadcasting according to the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). In this paper, in order to eliminate flooding in Ethernet, we proposed FSDM which focuses on DHCP and ARP broadcast based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to enhance the scalability of Ethernet. The most innovation of FSDM is information of all hosts cached on a controller, thus ARP messages can be handled without flooding in broadcast domain. Evaluation results show that FSDM reserves the auto-configuration characteristic, is transparent to hosts, allows redundant links existed in network, significantly reduces network traffic, and is provided with scalability.