Centralizing routing decisions offers tremendous flexibility, but sacrifices the robustness of distributed protocols. In this paper, we present Fibbing, an architecture that achieves both flexibility and robustness through central control over distributed routing. Fibbing introduces fake nodes and links into an underlying linkstate routing protocol, so that routers compute their own forwarding tables based on the augmented topology. Fibbing is expressive, and readily supports flexible load balancing, traffic engineering, and backup routes.
By enabling logically-centralized and direct control of the forwarding behavior of a network, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) holds great promise in terms of improving network management, performance, and costs. Realizing this vision is challenging though as SDN proposals to date require substantial and expensive changes to the existing network architecture before the benefits can be realized. As a result, the number of SDN deployments has been rather limited in scope. To kickstart a wide-scale SDN deployment, there is a need for low-risk, high return solutions that solve a timely problem.
BGP severely constrains how networks can deliver traffic over the Internet. Today’s networks can only forward traffic based on the destination IP prefix, by selecting among routes offered by their immediate neighbors. We believe Software Defined Networking (SDN) could revolutionize wide-area traffic delivery, by offering direct control over packet-processing rules that match on multiple header fields and perform a variety of actions.
BGP severely constrains how networks can deliver traffic over the Internet. Today’s networks can only forward traffic based on the destination IP prefix, by selecting among routes offered by their immediate neighbors. We believe Software Defined Networking (SDN) could revolutionize wide-area traffic delivery, by offering direct control over packet-processing rules that match on multiple header fields and perform a variety of actions.