SuperFlow: A Reliable, Controllable and Scalable Architecture for Large-Scale Enterprise Networks

Enterprise networks have become increasingly important with the rising number of users accessing their services, which consequently brings challenges in various aspects. Though Open Flow, the promising scheme for enterprise network control, can provide fine-grained and flow-level control in networks, yet it still has a few undesirable designs in security, scalability and performance. Inspired by many excellent Open Flow-included studies, we in this paper, propose Super Flow, a reliable, controlable and scalable architecture for large-scale enterprise networks. It not only inherits the merits of Open Flow, but also overcomes Open Flow´s limitations by introducing many novel features, including the trustiness between hosts and users based on the compulsory authentication mechanisms, the flexible flow controling upon the well-organized control-rule designing, the scalable architecture considerations in both controller load-balancing and management scales. The prototype experiments also prove that Super Flow possesses these features with desirable performance.