On Improving the Performance of Software-Defined Networking through Middlebox Policies

In today`s networks, middleboxes, typically deployed as standalone devices with no standardized access, play an important role in providing services such as firewalls and NATs as well as load balancing. These networks resort to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for management that can provide a centralized, programmable environment to direct traffic through a desired service chain. However, even if the SDN Controller is able to determine the best path to a certain middlebox, not having prior knowledge of its policies may lead to traffic bottlenecks, degrading overall network performance. By jointly considering the characteristics of middleboxes and SDN, we design a Lightweight, cost-effective, and middlebox policy-aware routing method to address this challenge. That is, a middlebox-translator module is added to the SDN architecture to help middleboxes give the controller routing“hints” in the REST (Representational State Transfer) API format so that better routing decisions can be made. A performance study using emulations of Mininet, shows that, compared to existing methods, our middlebox-aware design results in better performance in SDN-enabled systems, e.g., greater network bandwidth savings in firewall systems, or reduced response time as well as higher throughput in load-balancing systems.