OpenADN: Mobile apps on global clouds using OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in mobile applications (apps), most of which need to serve global audiences. This increasing trend of service access from mobile computing devices necessitates more dynamic application deployment strategies based on the user context (user device type, mobility, link conditions, location, energy constraints, etc.) and the variations in the user access demographics. Cloud computing provides unique new opportunities for application service providers (ASPs) to implement such deployment strategies by making it possible to dynamically allocate geographically distributed computing resources to the application. However, managing such a dynamic and distributed Internet-scale application deployment environment is hard; requiring ASPs to be able to intelligently route application traffic based on high-level application deployment policies over a dynamically changing deployment environment. To this end, we propose the design of an open and standard data plane abstraction called Open Application Delivery Networking (OpenADN) that will allow ASPs to express and enforce application traffic management policies and application delivery constraints at the required level of granularity. The key motivation to designing the OpenADN abstraction is to be able to extract and standardize a set of common application delivery requirements across a wide class of applications deployed over the Internet. OpenADN is designed within the Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework allowing each ASP to implement a separate control plane application to manage the data plane entities over OpenADN to suit the specific requirements of the application. The data plane entities may belong to the ASP itself or may be delegated to third party providers such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). We also make a case for augmenting the flow abstraction layer of SDN (OpenFlow) to add adequate support for OpenADN. OpenADN uses IP for forwarding packets to endpoint locators, making it easy to deploy over the current Internet with only a few OpenADN aware entities.