Efficient Packet Transmission with Multipath Routing in Software Networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking is an emerging technology in Internet, which changes the way we design and manage networks now a days. It focuses on separating the control and data plane of a network and controlling the data plane of network by a software based controller from control plane. OpenFlow is the base of SDN, which provides devices that does not have any control plane and an API to connect these devices with the control plane of network. Multipath routing is a way of transmitting data from a source to destination using multiple paths over the network to utilize available resources more efficiently. It is capable of aggregating multiple resources.Our approach here is combining these two together and try to achieve maximum throughput possible in data center networks as SDN penetration is increasing very rapidly in DCN. The approach is to use dynamic multipath routing in such a way that when the congestion is likely to occur, packet transmission via multiple paths will be done. With this approach when there is no congestion any more than the data transmission will again revert back to single path transmission, using this we will still be using the shortest path to the destination. This will improve the network resource utilization and reduce packet loss rate due to congestion. Our work also describes and implements the required amendments in the OpenFlow devices to support the multipath functionality in SDN, as current OpenFlow devices are not capable to support multipath routing.