Instruction based Packet Processing Scheme for Programmable SDN Data Plane

Software Defined Networking (SDN) decouples a network equipment’s control plane from its data plane, the underlying packet forwarding system. It makes a network to be easily programmable, and improves network flexibility especially on its control plane. However, the SDN technology so far cannot provide data plane programmability, the programmability for in-network processing (such as Network Address Translation or Deep Packet Inspection) and new non-IP protocols, in run-time. To provide the data plane programmability in run-time, two parts are needed: a method to describe the new data plane operation and a flexible network data plane to accept the operation in run-time. We propose a new packet processing scheme to support the data plane programmability in SDN data plane. The proposed scheme is based on well-known BSD packet filtering method. The implemented prototype shows that a controller application can write and insert a new arbitrary packet processing rule to the prototype engine in run-time.