Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF): Software-Defined Networking with Enhanced Programmability

• Published in: IEEE network Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 58 - 66
• Main Authors: Li, Shengru, Hu, Daoyun, Fang, Wenjian, Ma, Shoujiang, Chen, Cen, Huang, Huibai, Zhu, Zuqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Control systems; Ecosystems; Internet; Optical fibers; Planes; Software radio; Software-defined networking; Switches; Technological innovation; Throughput; Wide area networks; China
• ISSN: 0890-8044; 1558-156X
• DOI: 10.1109/MNET.2017.1600030NM

Software-defined networking separates the control and forwarding planes of a network to make it more programmable and application- aware. As one of the initial implementations of SDN, OpenFlow abstracts a forwarding device as a flow table and realizes flow processing by applying the "match-and-act" principle. However, the protocol-dependent nature of OpenFlow still limits the programmability of the forwarding plane. Hence, in this article, we discuss how to leverage protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) to further enhance the network programmability such that the forwarding plane becomes protocol-independent and can be dynamically reprogrammed to support new protocol stacks seamlessly. We first review the development of OpenFlow and explain the motivations for introducing POF. Then we explain the working principle of POF, discuss our efforts on realizing the POF development ecosystem, and show our implementation of POF-based source routing as a novel use case. Finally, we elaborate on the first WAN-based POF network testbed that includes POF switches located in two cities in China.