POFOX: Towards controlling the protocol oblivious forwarding network

Abstract

Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF) is a recently proposed technology that enables a protocol independent data plane under the context of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In this paper, we present POFOX, a SDN controller for POF. POFOX employs the full potentials of POF devices by allowing a protocol oblivious data plane, and it provides a simple programming model similar to POX. Based on POFOX, we construct a network testbed, and experimentally illustrate that POFOX can effectively manage the POF network, and provide the controlling functionality with high performances.