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East-West Bridge for SDN Network Peering
Pingping Lin, Jun Bi, and Yangyang Wang
Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Department of Computer Science,
Tsinghua University
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList)
FIT Building, Beijing, 100084, China
linpp@netarchlab.tsinghua.edu.cn, junbi@tsinghua.edu.cn,
wyystar@gmail.com
Abstract.
Large networks are always partitioned into several small networks
when deploying software defined networks (SDN), and a dedicated network op-
erating system (NOS) is deployed for each network. Each NOS has the local
network view. However, to route data packets in an entire network, a global
network is required. Thus, a high performance East-West Bridge with full mesh
connection is proposed in this paper for heterogeneous NOSes to exchange
network views in enterprise, data center, and intra-domain networks. We im-
plemented the East-West Bridge and analyzed the performance obtained: about
100% of enterprises and data centers, and about 99.5% of autonomous systems
can adopt the East-West Bridge solution.
Keywords:
Software-Defined Networking, Heterogeneous SDN Peers, Network
View, East-West Bridge.
1
Introduction
When deploying Software defined networking SDN [1] in real networks, large networks
are always partitioned into several smaller networks (referred to as sub-networks) due to
numerous reasons [19]: scalability, privacy, incremental deployment, network faults
isolation, and so on. Each sub-network runs one NOS or controller such as NOX [20],
Maestro [21], Beacon [4], Floodlight [18], Trema [10] etc. Each NOS only has a local
network view (the network view in this paper refers to topology, reachability, entities,
network abilities, network state). However, many network applications (APPs) need a
global view of the entire network. Based on such requirements, controllers should be
able to construct a global network view and provided it to APPs. In order to do so,
multiple NOSes may need to communicate with each other to exchange individual net-
work view information or share a global network view database. Also, there are several
distributed NOSes such as Onix [7], HyperFlow [8], DIFANE [17], and so no. Howev-
er, none of them can coexist with others, because the east-west communication interface
is private. The target of this paper is to enable different NOSes from different vendors to
work together.
We refer to as an SDN domain a sub-network which runs one NOS and is parti-
tioned from a larger network. In this paper an SDN domain can be a sub-network in a
