Tag-Based Classification for Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) increasingly attracts more researchers as well as industry attentions. Most of current SDN packet processing approaches classify packets based on matching a set of fields on the packet against a flow table and then applying an action on the packet. The authors argue that it is possible to simplify this mechanism using single-field classification and reduce the overhead. They propose a tag-based packet classification architecture to reduce filtering and flow management overhead. Then, they show how to use this extra capacity to perform application layer classification for different purposes. The authors demonstrated their evaluation results to indicate the effectiveness of the proposal. Furthermore, they implemented a customized user-defined SDN action that addresses some security challenges of one of their previous works and showed performance evaluation results.