Security problems in the TCP/IP protocol suite
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
OpenFlow: enabling innovation in campus networks
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Frenetic: a network programming language
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Communications of the ACM
Fabric: a retrospective on evolving SDN
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
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A flexible and programmable forwarding plane is essential to maximize the value of Software-Defined Networks (SDN). In this paper, we propose Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) as a key enabler for highly flexible and programmable SDN. Our goal is to remove any dependency on protocol-specific configurations on the forwarding elements and enhance the data-path with new stateful instructions to support genuine software defined networking behavior. A generic flow instruction set (FIS) is defined to fulfill this purpose. POF helps to lower network cost by using commodity forwarding elements and to create new value by enabling numerous innovative network services. We built both hardware-based and open source software-based prototypes to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of POF. We report the preliminary evaluation results and the insights we learnt from the experiments. POF is future-proof and expressive. We believe it represents a promising direction to evolve the OpenFlow protocol and the future SDN forwarding elements.