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