Providing in-network content-based routing using OpenFlow

Abstract

Content-based routing as provided by publish/subscribe systems has evolved as a key paradigm for interactions between loosely coupled application components (content publishers and subscribers). Content-based routing aims to increase the efficiency of forwarding by utilizing the diversity of information exchanged between application components. Using content-based forwarding rules (also called content filters) installed on content-basedrouters (also termed brokers), bandwidth-efficiency is increased by only forwarding content to the subset of subscribers who are actually interested in the published content. Many middle-ware implementations for content-based publish/subscribe have been developed over the last decade. However, implemented on the application layer, their performance is still far behind the performance of communication protocols implemented on the network layer w.r.t. throughput, end-to-end latency and bandwidth efficiency. Therefore, it would be highly attractive to implement content-based routing directly on the network layer. Especially, the advent of new networking technologies namely, software-define networking and network virtualization have potential to make this reality. To this end, recently a reference architecture has been proposed allowing for the embedding of content-based routing at the network layer by utilizing OpenFlow specification. The task of this thesis is the concrete realization of content-based routing in the OpenFlow reference architecture. In particular, the thesis focuses on the implementation/embedding of filtering-based publish/subscribe approaches in the reference architecture, as a proof of concept. The implementation is then evaluated w.r.t. message forwarding delay, false positives etc.