Enabling active flow manipulation in silicon-based network forwarding engines

Abstract

A significant challenge in today's Internet is the ability to efficiently incorporate customizable network intelligence in commercial high performance network devices. This paper tackles the challenge by introducing the Active Flow Manipulation (AFM) mechanism, a key enabling technology of the programmable networking platform Openet. AFM enhances the control intelligence of network devices through programmability. With AFM, customer network services can exercise active network control by identifying specific flows and applying particular actions thereby altering network behavior in real-time. These services are offered through Openet dynamically deployed in the CPU-based control plane of the network node and are closely coupled with the silicon-based forwarding plane, without negatively impacting forwarding performance. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by four experimental applications on commercial network nodes.