An architecture to manage incoming traffic of inter-domain routing using OpenFlow networks

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the current state-of-the-art inter-domain routing between Autonomous Systems (ASes). Although BGP has different mechanisms to manage outbound traffic in an AS domain, it lacks an efficient tool for inbound traffic control from transit ASes such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs). For inter-domain routing, the BGP's destination-based forwarding paradigm limits the granularity of distributing the network traffic among the multiple paths of the current Internet topology. Thus, this work offered a new architecture to manage incoming traffic in the inter-domain using OpenFlow networks. The architecture explored direct inter-domain communication to exchange control information and the functionalities of the OpenFlow protocol. Based on the achieved results of the size of exchanging messages, the proposed architecture is not only scalable, but also capable of performing load balancing for inbound traffic using different strategies.