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Shadow MACs: scalable label-switching for commodity ethernet

Published: 22 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

While SDN promises fine-grained, dynamic control of the network, in practice limited switch TCAM rule space restricts most forwarding to be coarse-grained. As an alternative, we demonstrate that using destination MAC addresses as opaque forwarding labels allows an SDN controller to leverage large MAC (L2) forwarding tables to manage a plethora of fine-grained paths. In this shadow MAC model, the SDN controller can install MAC rewrite rules at the network edge to guide traffic on to intelligently selected paths to balance traffic, avoid failed links, or route flows through middleboxes. Further, by decoupling the network edge from the core, we address many other problems with SDN, including consistent network updates, fast rerouting, and multipathing with end-to-end control.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HotSDN '14: Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
    August 2014
    252 pages
    ISBN:9781450329897
    DOI:10.1145/2620728
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 22 August 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. consistent updates
    2. datacenter
    3. ethernet
    4. label-switching
    5. routing
    6. software-defined networking

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    SIGCOMM'14: ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference
    August 22, 2014
    Illinois, Chicago, USA

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