Towards a Publish/Subscribe-based Open Policy Framework for Proactive Overlay Software Defined Networking

Proactive overlay software defined networking (SDN) aim to overcome the limitations with reactive hop-byhop approaches for large-scale networks. However, the stateful nature of XMPP used by proactive overlay SDN approaches result in scalability issues. To address these concerns, this paper proposes the use of data-centric publish/subscribe paradigm, such as the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS), for proactive overlay SDNs. To that end this paper makes two contributions. First, it presents a reference architecture called DDSFlex that can be used to build open and vendor-neutral, DDS-based southbound interfaces for proactive overlay SDN. Second, it describes a solution for realizing a SDN controller that operates in a distributed manner illustrating the messaging protocol it uses. Details of existing implementation of our approach are described.