SDNMA: A Software-Defined, Dynamic Network Manipulation Application to Enhance BGP Functionality

Software-defined networking (SDN) is reshaping the networking paradigm. The previous studies on SDN show that SDN implementations have advantages over traditional networks. Enhancing the existing SDN functionality to the global network level, this paper examines how utilizing the flexibility and programmability of SDN will benefit both inter-AS and intra-AS Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) functionality. This research proposes a software-defined dynamic network manipulation application (SDNMA) that provides dynamic, real-time, application-based network manipulation when peering with traditional eBGP peers. Our results show that the network-aware application can dynamically manipulate paths in SDN per BGP updates received from neighbors, converge the network if a traditional BGP peering connection is lost, limit the number of iBGP speakers inside the AS, and make application-based traffic engineering decisions based on real-time network information such as throughput, delay, and loss.