SProxy ARP - efficient ARP handling in SDN

Abstract

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) traffic typically makes up a very significant amount of broadcast traffic in a wide range of networks. A common approach to reduce the network overhead of ARP in the context of Software Defined Networks (SDN) is via Proxy ARP, where the SDN controller answers ARP requests on behalf of the hosts. In this paper, we present a significant improvement of this approach, by offloading the proxy ARP functionality from the controller to OpenFlow switches. As we will show via experiments, this has the benefit of significantly reducing the controller load as well as the ARP response time. In contrast to related works, our approach does not rely on any non-standard switch extensions, and is fully OpenFlow standard compliant.