Scalable Ethernet Architecture Using SDN by Suppressing Broadcast Traffic

Abstract

The simplicity and high performance-to-cost ratio make Ethernet, the most dominant and widely deployed LAN technology. But, a single Ethernet network cannot scale to large networks such as enterprise, campus, data center and wide area networks because of broadcast based services like Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based scheme SEASDN is proposed here to effectively enhance the scalability of Ethernet by suppressing broadcast traffic. In this scheme, DHCP and ARP broadcast messages are relayed through SDN controller to the destination and thus eliminating the need for broadcasting. The proposed scheme can eliminate flooding without any change to the existing hardware, software and protocols of hosts and also can detect ARP spoofing attack. The simulation results show that SEASDN is very much effective in ARP and DHCP broadcast suppression than the current SDN broadcast handling methods while reducing control plane overhead and data plane traffic significantly.