A framework to rapidly test SDN use-cases and accelerate middlebox applications

Software-defined networking (SDN) is envisioned to provide a centralized interface to programmatically manage networking elements. However, despite its conceptual simplicity, current switch and SDN architectures have poor performance with little support to innovate and test novel SDN applications. We propose an application extensibility framework that allows researchers to build new SDN applications without requiring modification to the OpenFlow-based plumbing available today. We also employ both hardware and software packet processing capabilities of switching elements by offloading intensive per-packet processing onto the switch processing pipeline using dynamically loadable packet processing modules (PPMs). Our architecture thus allows flexibility in the type of applications alongside high switching performance. We believe that our architecture will unleash the potential of SDN by inspiring the SDN “killer app”. We evaluate our framework using an encryption middlebox application and show a two orders-of-magnitude improvement over an implementation using the current SDN architecture when using hardware offload blocks.