SDNS: Exploiting SDN and the DNS to exchange traffic in a federated network

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Abstract

Federated networks have primarily emerged to support cloud computing services, in order to reduce costs for providers, as well as to increase their incomes. Up to now, the research activity has been mostly focused on architectures and cost models, setting aside technological aspects. In this paper, we propose SDNS, an SDN-system that opens the application fields of federated networks to federated connectivity services. By exploiting the centralized architecture offered by SDN and relying on the OpenFlow protocol, the most adopted enabler for SDN, we propose a way to easily interact with the Domain Name System (DNS) traffic in order to allow communication among multiple customers connected to different providers in presence of any type of IP address plan. We tested the scalability of our approach in a prototype implementation based on Netkit, a widely adopted simulation environment. We measured several control-plane overhead metrics, like the number of DNS, OpenFlow, and SDNS messages exchanged in the network. Our experiments show that the scalability of our method is essentially the same of the DNS service.