A Virtual Id Routing Protocol for Future Dynamics Networks and Its Implementation Using the SDN Paradigm

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Virtual Id Routing (VIRO) a novel "plug-&-play" non-IP routing protocol for future dynamics networks. VIRO decouples routing/forwarding from addressing by introducing a topology-aware, structured virtual id layer to encode the locations of switches and devices in the physical topology. It completely eliminates network-wide flooding in both the data and control planes, and thus is highly scalable and robust. VIRO effectively localizes the effect of failures, performs fast re-routing and supports multiple (logical) topologies on top of the same physical network substrate to further enhance network robustness. We have implemented an initial prototype of VIRO using Open vSwitch, and we extend it (both within the user space and the kernel space) to implement VIRO switching functions in VIRO switches. In addition, we use the POX SDN controller to implement VIRO's control and management plane functions. We evaluate our prototype implementation through emulation and in the GENI (the Global Environment for Network Innovations) testbed using many synthetic and real topologies. Our evaluation results show that VIRO has better scalability than link-state based protocols (e.g. OSPF and SEATTLE) in terms of routing-table size and control overhead, as well as better mechanisms for failure recovery.