Implementation of SDN Stateful Firewall on Data Plane using Open vSwitch

Abstract

A Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been deployed in the current network system. Together with Network Virtualization (NVF), it makes the network become more flexible. The firewall can be implemented in SDN. However, with the limitation of earlier version of OpenFlow protocol used in SDN, the stateful firewall could not be implemented with the SDN standard. The development of OpenFlow enables some features that can be used for implementing the stateful firewall. In this work, we implement the stateful firewall in the SDN switch on the data plane. The Open vSwitch is used. We also evaluate the performance of the SDN stateful firewall. The results show that our SDN stateful firewall can work correctly with small overhead increased in SDN switches.