Smart Packet: Re-distributing the Routing Intelligence among Network Components in SDNs

Abstract

Abstract-In this work, a new region-based, multipath-enabled packet routing is presented and called SmartPacket Routing.The proposed approach provides several opportunities to redistribute the smartness and decision making among various elements of a network including the packets themselves toward providing a decentralized solution for SDNs. This would bring efficiency and scalability, and therefore also lower environmental footprint for the ever-growing networks. In particular, a regionbased representation of the network topology is proposed which is then used to describe the routing actions along the possible paths for a packet flow. In addition to a region stack that expresses a partial or full regional path of a packet, QoS requirements of the packet (or its associated flow) is considered in the packet header in order to enable possible QoS-aware routing at region level without requiring a centralized controller.

New cooperative mechanisms for software defined networks based on hybrid switches

“…Thus, the use of Static Random Access Memories(SRAMs), which do not have the restrictions of TCAMs, has been proposed to improve network scalability as in PAST . Alternatively, tiny packet programs or SmartPacket incorporate state information in the packets. Thus, ongoing research is going into reducing the tasks performed on the SDN control plane by moving these tasks onto the data plane …”