Eliminating duplicated paths to reduce computational cost of rule generation by using SDN

Abstract

Nowadays, SDN(Software Defined Network) has become a powerful technology that has abilities to program network flow paths into flow-table in switches for network control. In SDN architecture, data plane and control plane are decoupled, and then by manipulating flow-table on control plane network control is available. The function of SDN is used to supplement limitation or difficulties of other technologies. For example cloud computing system has difficulties to use existing security devices due to its dynamic and virtualization environment. For the solution, Cloudwatcher framework was designed. In Cloudwatcher, there are four algorithms to take network traffic to certain security node in cloud computing environment by using SDN. However when Cloudwatcher generates paths from source node to destination and security nodes, there is possibility of computational cost according to topology. In this paper, we propose an approach to reduce to the rule generation computation cost by excluding duplicated paths during rule generation time. Our evaluation results show that computation cost can be reduced by considerable amount according to topology environment. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.