Toward Fabric: A middleware implementing high-level description languages on a Fabric-like network?

Many in the networking community believe that Software-Defined Networking, in which entire networks are managed centrally, has the potential to revolutionize the field. However, SDN faces several challenges that have prevented its wide-spread adoption. Current SDN technologies, such as OpenFlow, provide powerful and flexible APIs, but can be unreasonably complex for implementing nontrivial network control logic. The generality offered by these low-level abstractions impose no structure on the network, requiring programmers to herd switches themselves, with little guidance. Many researchers argue that SDNs must adopt more structured models, such as Fabric, with an intelligent edge and a fast but simple label-switched core. Our work draws heavily from these ideas. To that end, we propose ToF, a middleware architecture for implementing policies and behaviors from high-level network descriptions on top of a Fabric-like network. We have implemented a prototype using a combination of widely used technologies, such as MPLS, and our own proposed technologies. Based on our results, we reach near linear scalability with respect to the number of addresses routed over the network, all while introducing minimal performance overhead and requiring no changes to packet structure.