Compression of Interdomain SDN Policies at Exchange Points

Abstract:

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities
are a promising way of shaping the future of interdomain traffic delivery on the
Internet—allowing IXP participants to express flexible SDN policies on interdomain
traffic. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to compile interdomain traffic policies
into forward table sizes reasonable for available commodity switches, and indeed this
shows in state-of-the-art Software-Defined IXP implementations. To compile interdomain
traffic SDN policies, available prefix routes must be factored in to ensure
correctness, resulting in an explosion in the size that a policy requires in the forwarding
plane. To combat this scalabilty challenge, new compression techniques of
forwarding table entries are required. In this work, we discuss the design and analysis
of such a technique, which allows near-optimal compression of SDN policies for IXPs
with large numbers of participants.