SIMPLE-fying middlebox policy enforcement using SDN

  • Authors:

  • Zafar Ayyub Qazi;Cheng-Chun Tu;Luis Chiang;Rui Miao;Vyas Sekar;Minlan Yu

  • Affiliations:

  • Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA;Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA;Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA;Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Networks today rely on middleboxes to provide critical performance, security, and policy compliance capabilities. Achieving these benefits and ensuring that the traffic is directed through the desired sequence of middleboxes requires significant manual effort and operator expertise. In this respect, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a promising alternative. Middleboxes, however, introduce new aspects (e.g., policy composition, resource management, packet modifications) that fall outside the purvey of traditional L2/L3 functions that SDN supports (e.g., access control or routing). This paper presents SIMPLE, a SDN-based policy enforcement layer for efficient middlebox-specific "traffic steering''. In designing SIMPLE, we take an explicit stance to work within the constraints of legacy middleboxes and existing SDN interfaces. To this end, we address algorithmic and system design challenges to demonstrate the feasibility of using SDN to simplify middlebox traffic steering. In doing so, we also take a significant step toward addressing industry concerns surrounding the ability of SDN to integrate with existing infrastructure and support L4-L7 capabilities.