A Framework to Achieve Full Waypoint Enforcement in Hybrid SDN Networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) addresses the operational challenges faced in maintaining legacy networks by decoupling the data plane and control plane. Overhauling of the network to replace legacy switches with SDN switches is not economically viable. Incremental deployment of SDN devices is the most promising approach. Hybrid SDN network contains both legacy and SDN devices in a network. One of the challenges in hybrid SDN network is to enforce traffic to go through some of the SDN switches (waypoints) present in the network. There exist a few solutions in the literature to achieve waypoint enforcement, but practically none of them provide full waypoint enforcement. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to achieve full waypoint enforcement. The proposed framework uses virtual IP addresses to divert the complete network traffic towards the SDN switches present in the network. We also provide an analysis of the framework.