Extending open vSwitch to L4-L7 service aware OpenFlow switch

The evolution of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and network virtualization changed the future networking paradigm. Network virtualization is the key element in cloud-aware networks. OpenFlow allows the separation of the control plane from forward plane, which provides the flexibility of dynamic network programming. The Open vSwitch is an OpenFlow based open source switch implementation which is used as a virtual switch in virtualized environments. The OpenFlow specifications are targeted for Layer2 and layer3 functionality. The latest networking shift is to enable the switch with L4-L7 services like load balancers, proxies, firewalls, IPSec etc. This would make the middle boxes redundant in the networking deployments. In this work, we propose a methodology to extend the most commonly used Open vSwitch to L4-L7 service aware OpenFlow switch.