Inter-domain networking innovation on steroids: empowering ixps with SDN capabilities

Abstract

While innovation in inter-domain routing has remained stagnant for over a decade, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are consolidating their role as economically advantageous interconnection points for reducing path latencies and exchanging ever increasing amounts of traffic. As such, IXPs appear as a natural place to foster network innovation and assess the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), a recent technological trend that has already boosted innovation within data-center networks. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of use cases for SDN at IXPs, which leverage the superior vantage point of an IXP to introduce advanced features like load-balancing and DDoS mitigation. We discuss the benefits of SDN solutions by analyzing real-world data from one of the largest IXPs. We also leverage insights into IXP operations to not only shape benefits for members but also for operators.

ENDEAVOUR: A Scalable SDN Architecture For Real-World IXPs

“…The set of use cases that can be enabled have been introduced in [7] and partially demonstrated in [31].…”

“…Unfortunately, only the intradomain level has benefited from SDN deployment so far [6]. Because of their centrality and relevance, IXPs are the ideal place from where to extend the benefits of SDN to the Internet at large [7]. However, existing SDN solutions for IXPs are either non-deployable at real fabrics, because they cannot handle multi-hop topologies [8], [9], or provide only very limited SDN capabilities [10], [11].…”

“…In ENDEAVOUR, we identify three mechanisms to tackle this issue: duplication of outbound policies, bouncing packets back to the ingress switch, and injection of recovery information in the packets. Finally, using real data one of the largest European IXP, and a realistic multi-hop topology, we evaluate ENDEAVOUR and show its scalability and advanced use cases [7] such as internal IXP load-balancing, i.e., across the core-switches, and blackholing. Our evaluation shows that ENDEAVOUR requires around 70% rules less than alternative SDN solutions [9], [10], its internal load balancing approach achieves similar results to the more complex but typically used Equal-Cost Multi-Path Routing (ECMP) [12], and provides a fast fail over recovery mechanism.…”

Privacy-Preserving Detection of Inter-Domain SDN Rules Overlaps

“…Adopting SDN in the inter-domain setting has recently been a goal of both academia and industry [3,6]. These works Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

“…However, these approaches were designed for the intra-domain setting and usually operate on a snapshot of the network state. In the inter-domain setting, one can hardly obtain such a snapshot: SDN deflection rules will likely be treated as business information that operators are unwilling to share [1,3]. In this regard, Birkner et al [1] strike a balance between the privacy of the forwarding state and the accuracy of the detected forwarding cycles.…”