State-aware Packet Forwarding on Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Forwarding application is one of the most important application for sending packets in Software defined networking (SDN). It makes decision of setting flow rules for the incoming packets into switches and forwards them by matching packet's header information. But current forwarding application does not inspect the state information. Such stateless application is often vulnerable to attack such as abnormal sequence packet. In order to overcome the weakness of the application, stateful or state-aware forwarding application is implemented in this paper. Though, adding security operation might affect the performance, the application is developed with the aims of getting both higher security and performance. According to the objectives, this paper finally shows that the state-aware application is able to not only track the TCP flow but also reduce latency plus table lookup time up to 16% in long-lived flow and 50% in short-lived flow.