MSDN-TE: Multipath based traffic engineering for SDN

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking is a new networking paradigm that has recently gained a lot of attention in the networking community. Its fundamental idea lies on the separation of the centralized control plane and the distributed forwarding plane. Due to global network view and the programmability, SDN is a better tool for solving traffic engineering problems than mechanisms, which exist in classical IP networks. In this paper a simple approach to SDN traffic engineering based on multipath forwarding is presented. The approach lies on dynamic selecting of the best path among several paths for forwarding of an incoming flow. The concept has been simulated using the OpenDaylight controller and Mininet simulator. Simulations have confirmed advantages of the proposed concept over the Shortest Path First (built-in the OpenDaylight controller) and Spanning Tree Protocol (Mininet simple forwarding techniques) approaches.