Design Of Extensible Forwarding Element Architecture And Its Key Technology Implementation

Computer network technology is becoming more and more diverse with the diversity of network requirements,and Software Defined Network(SDN)attracts more and more attention in both academia and industry because of its unique data plane and control plane separation and flexible programmability.SDN currently focuses on and resolves the scalability and dynamic deployment of control plane,but research on the scalability and dynamic deployment of data plane has just begun.Since the data plane is increasingly becoming a bottleneck to limit the development of SDN.One of keys to solve the scalability and dynamic deployment of data plane is the suitable architecture of the forwarding element(FE).Therefore,this paper focuses on the design of FE architecture and the design and prototype implementation of the key technologies.The main research contents of this paper include:(1)Aiming at the problem which the scalability and dynamic deployment capability of current forwarding elements is insufficient,the new forwarding element architecture is proposed based on the latest research of the data plane.The new forwarding element architecture includes language element,system construction element,component library management element,runtime environment element and network environment element,and they are defined and described in detail.(2)The key technologies of the five elements in the new forwarding element architecture are designed and the prototype systems are implemented.They mainly include network function development library based on Java,the solution of system construction element based on directed graph,the design and implementation of runtime environment element instance based on OSGI,the packet parsing solution based on the parsing method of extended protocol parsing tree model(EPPTM)and network environment element instance which OpenFlow is extended to support the restructure of network functions which runtime environment element provides.(3)The advantages of the new FE architecture in the scalability and dynamic deployment is analyzed through the specific application scenarios,and the UUID network is designed and implemented based on prototype system to demonstrate the feasibility and flexibility of the new FE architecture.