Software-Defined Networking: Experimenting with the Control to Forwarding Plane Interface

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture where the network control plane is decoupled from the forwarding plane and is programmable via an open protocol. Forwarding and Control Element Separation (Forces) first and OpenFlow later are the prevailing protocols that enable this separation. The differences between the two stem from the underlying models they are defined upon. While OpenFlow is widely used, its capability for adding new functionality of the Forwarding plane is questionable, a fact that is attributed to a restricted model. In contrast, Forces has a very dynamic model that makes its protocol quite powerful but has known little spread due to lack of industry adoption and in the academic world due to lack of open source availability for experimentation. In this paper we first investigate ways of possible confluence or convergence of Forces and OpenFlow and later we explore a real-life service use case for applying a Enabled-enabled OpenFlow switch.