An architecture to envolve the inter-domain routing using software-defined networking

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the current state-of-the-art protocol for inter-domain routing between Autonomous System (AS). The BGP follows the traditional network paradigm, where the network logic is embedded into the network hardware, new network capabilities are defined only in the protocol design phase, solutions have a distributed nature, and network management is often manually executed. This approach makes challenging to evolve inter-domain routing because architecture becomes very dependent on the protocol, and consequently adding new features are inherently hard to introduce into the network. With Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, new architectures can emerge to overcome inter-domain routing limitations (e.g., limited mechanisms to control inbound traffic of a given AS). Thus, this work offers a new architecture to manage traffic in the inter-domain using SDN technologies. The architecture explores direct inter-domain communication to exchange control information as well as the functionalities of the OpenFlow protocol. It also addresses the challenge of adopting SDN technologies in the inter-domain environment, such as resilience mechanisms for link failures, management of flows and avoids inconsistency in SDN stateful application. Furthermore, after the depiction of the architecture, different scenarios are proposed for evaluation of the architecture capabilities. The results indicate the potential of the architecture to evolve the inter-domain routing, once it provides new mechanisms to perform Traffic Engineering (TE) and addresses solutions to mitigate the limitations of using SDN technologies in the inter-domain environment.