Software Defined Layer 4.5 Customization for Agile Network Operation

Abstract

Protocol customizations primarily come in two forms: those driven by public extensions to open standard protocols; and dialecting and performance tuning driven by an enterprise network’s private security and performance needs. Current deployment of protocol customizations is mostly ad hoc, through manual configuration or script programs that are highly specialized to each customization. This method lacks the agility necessary to support the relatively high tempo of private customizations. Also, it is common for today’s protocol customization efforts to experience middlebox interference. We propose a systematic framework of network-wide orchestration and continuous management of protocol customization to enable agile operation for enterprise and data-center networks. By introducing a logically centralized orchestrator along with a Layer 4.5 fine-grained device customization solution, our framework will allow operators to configure, deploy, and monitor customized flows from a single vantage point, providing timely detection of rogue devices as well as real-time coordination of middlebox traversal. Results from prototyping and experimentation confirm utility of our framework while incurring modest processing overhead, at the levels of 3% and 0.5% for sample customized flows and non-customized flows, respectively. Furthermore, we present two major system refinements: (i) generalizing the design of receiving modules to support customization of encrypted flows, and (ii) adding logic system wide to support seamless rotation of customization modules for live flows. Finally, we discuss specific agile network operation use cases enabled by our solution and outline future work.