DAI: Dynamic ACL Policy Implementation for Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Existing approaches of SDN declare the Access Control List (ACL) policies at the controller. For computing the path, the controller matches the packet with all ACL policies irrespective that whether the hosts of an ACL policy are connected or not to the network. It incurs longer processing delay at the controller, which causes a longer end-to-end delay for the data packets and limits the controller's scalability. This paper suggests a novel mechanism called Dynamic ACL policy Implementation (DAI), for SDN, to address this problem that matches the controller's packet with only active ACL policies. Active ACL policies are those whose hosts are connected to the network. This mechanism reduces the processing delay at the controller and would reduce the end-to-end delay for data packets. Moreover, this will increase the scalability of the SDN controller because the saved timing could be used by the controller to process other tasks. Through simulation results, we show that our proposed approach performs better than the existing approach.