ENDEAVOUR: A Scalable SDN Architecture For Real-World IXPs.

Abstract

Innovation in interdomain routing has remained stagnant for over a decade. Recently, IXPs have emerged as economically-advantageous interconnection points for reducing path latencies and exchanging ever increasing traffic volumes among, possibly, hundreds of networks. Given their far-reaching implications on interdomain routing, IXPs are the ideal place to foster network innovation and extend the benefits of SDN to the interdomain level. In this paper, we present, evaluate, and demonstrate EN- DEAVOUR, an SDN platform for IXPs. ENDEAVOUR can be deployed on a multi-hop IXP fabric, supports a large number of use cases, and is highly-scalable while avoiding broadcast storms. Our evaluation with real data from one of the largest IXPs, demonstrates the benefits and scalability of our solution: ENDEAVOUR requires around 70% fewer rules than alternative SDN solutions thanks to our rule partitioning mechanism. In addition, by providing an open source solution, we invite ev- eryone from the community to experiment (and improve) our implementation as well as adapt it to new use cases.European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the ENDEAVOUR project (grant agreement 644960)