PRS: A payload inspection mechanism for Software Defined Network

This paper proposes a mechanism that enables to the inspection of payloads in a packet inside software defined network switch called PRS, and presents a prototype implementation that combines a sequence of payloads decomposed by TCP segmentation and also IP fragmentation. Introducing Software Defined Network (SDN) facilitates network management in which network topologies will be free from physical connections among network switches. Since switches in SDN can only refer to fields of layer 2-4 in TCP/IP network, a controller that controls switches cannot use the payload, which is higher-layer information over layer 5 in TCP/IP network, for routing, preventing developing applications such as layer 7 switch and/or load balancers.In this paper, we will overcome this limitation, then make it possible to control networks using payloads. To address this issue, we propose the entire architecture of PRS, then show the performance of the essential prototype implementation that combines a sequence of payloads by conducting experiments.