Routing Research And Improvements In Openflow-Traditional Hybrid Environment

The OpenFlow technology originated from Stanford University brings a revolution to the internet innovations. OpenFlow splits the functionality of con-trol and forwarding, and employs centralized hierarchy as well as flow-based forwarding mechanisms, compared to traditional networks. These innovations make network administrators to be able to change functionalities even after the physical devices have already been deployed (also known as "Software Defined Network"). Since OpenFlow has so many advantages over traditional network, it is known as the main competitor of future internet.Routing is recognized as an essential functionality of a network, however traditional fully-distributed routing mechanism doesn’t properly fit in an Open-Flow network because of the change in network architecture. Thus after some investigation and research, we design and implement a routing framework that fits in the current environment in which OpenFlow network co-exists with tra-ditional network. Compared to other routing schemes, our framework has three major benefits:· The centralized routing mechanism is consistent with OpenFlow’s design, and brings some extra benefits, like faster convergence of routing algo-rithms.· Our framework opens routing decision API so new thoughts and improve-ments could be easy to implement.· Our framework coorperates well with traditional networks and exchanges routing information with them via BGP protocol. After implementing the prototype system, we deployed and tested it in both mininet environment and the "Internet management and test platform". The result shows the system runs as expected.