Coding Openflow: Enable Network Coding in SDN Networks

Abstract

There is no doubt that network coding is a promising enhancement of routing to improve network throughput and provide high reliability. However, there are several open problems in practical network coding, especially on how to guarantee coding advantage for a decentralized control network without the knowledge of the network topology. The biggest benefit of OpenFlow is to decouple the control plane from the data plane, allowing the centralized forwarding decisions in comparison to traditional distributed control network. As a result, we propose a Software-Defined coding network and address key technical challenges in practice. We design NC-OF, a framework to enable networking coding in SDN networks, and use MMF-NC coding strategy proposed by Guan Xu in NC-OF. Finally, we proved that our solutions can effectively improve network performance through simulation experiments. And we also find that network coding is not necessary when the link bandwidth is enough , because it will bring the problems of time delay, the increase in the amount of calculation and so on.