Towards SmartFlow

Abstract

The limited capabilities of the switches renders the implementation of unorthodox routing and forwarding mechanisms as a hard task in OpenFlow. Our high level goal is therefore to inspect the possibilities of slightly smartening up the OpenFlow switches. As a first step in this direction we demonstrate (with Bloom filters, greedy routing and network coding) that a very limited computational capability enables us to natively support experimental technologies while preserving performance. We distribute the demos in source files and as a ready-to-experiment VM image to promote further improvements and evaluations.