A kernel-space POF virtual switch

Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF) aims at providing a standard southbound interface for sustainable Software Defined Networking (SDN) evolvement. It overcomes the limitations of popular OpenFlow protocols (an existing widely-adopted southbound interface), through the enhancement of SDN forwarding plane. This paper pioneers the design and implementation of a Kernel-space POF Virtual Switch (K_POFVS) on Linux platform. K_POFVS can improve the packet processing speed, through fast packet forwarding and the capability of adding/deleting/modifying protocol fields in kernel space. In addition, it is able to enhance flow table matching speed, by separating the mask table (consisting of flow entry masks used to figure out the matching field) and the flow table under a caching mechanism. Furthermore, K_POFVS can achieve efficient communication between the kernel space and the user space, via extending the netlink communication between them. Experimental results show that K_POFVS can provide much better performance than existing user-space POF virtual switches, in terms of packet forwarding delay, packet processing delay and packet transmission rate.