Border Gateway Protocol based Path Vector mechanism for inter-domain routing in Software Defined Network environment

In distributed OpenFlow controller networks, the network flow is managed by set of associated rules that are maintained by switches in their local Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) and rules are made by concerned controllers, which are local to domains. However, TACM is expensive and consumes high power. The switch inside the forwarding plane has limited TCAM space and is infeasible to maintain all rules inside switch. Moreover, if all the packets sent to controllers to minimize the TCAM space, this result in increasing the controller delay, heavy processing burden and increase at controllers, flow setup time. The proposed work in this paper, strives all the above-mentioned issues in multi-domain controllers by adopting the Path-Vector algorithm with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The above aforementioned problems are formulated by splitting the traffic into more than one path and installing the flow rules only on the switches along the path from source to destination by making the network more scalable. This paper proposes Border Gateway Protocol based Path-Vector (BGP-PV) mechanism to choose the path from the vector displayed by the Path-Vector and later split and route the traffic accordingly. The designed mechanism is implemented in an OMNeT++ simulation environment with INET framework and OpenFlow module. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can significantly reduce the average end-to-end delay by improving the network throughput. Using this mechanism, the network manager can choose the path in inter-domain routing to minimize the routing cost, and average end-to-end delay thereby increasing the total network throughput.