On the feasibility of “breadcrumb” trails within OpenFlow switches

Abstract

Several network protocols require the ability to dynamically deploy, along a network path, stateful data, nicknamed “breadcrumbs”, used to forward packets on the reverse direction. This is the case of either classical reverse path forwarding schemes, as well as more recent information centric networking approaches. Perhaps surprisingly, this paper shows that such capability is already somewhat at reach in current OpenFlow switch architectures: its support requires only very marginal modification of the existing OpenFlow hardware. We support our claim with a concrete hardware proof-of-concept implementation, and we show, with the help of both traditional reverse path schemes and original approaches, how such functionality can be programmed via a platform-agnostic abstraction.