| In today's world, transmitting data across large bandwidth-delay product (BDP) networks requires special configuration on end users' machines in order to be done efficiently. This added level of complexity creates extra cost and is usually overlooked by users unknowledgeable to the issues. This is one example problem which can be ameliorated with the emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm. In an SDN, packet forwarding is controlled via software controllers. In an OpenFlow SDN, a controller can control the forwarding, rewriting, and dropping of packets based on their header attributes. The ability to handle packets in customizable ways in software has significant implications for both users and operators of the network.;Via SDN, network providers can easily provide services to enhance users' experience of the network. Steroid OpenFlow Service (SOS) is presented as a solution to seamless enhancement of TCP data transfer throughput over large BDP networks without any modification to the software and configurations on users' machines. SOS utilizes OpenFlow to redirect application specific traffic to application specific service agents. SOS uses service agents on both ends of the connection to seamlessly terminate a user's TCP connection, launch a set of parallel TCP connections, and leverage multiple paths when available to maximize throughput. |
