Towards Software Defined Layer 4.5 Customization

Protocol customizations primarily come in two forms: those driven by public extensions to open standard protocols; and dialecting and performance tuning driven by an enterprise network’s private security and performance needs. Current deployment of protocol customizations is mostly ad hoc, through manual configuration or script programs that are highly specialized to each customization. The method lacks the agility necessary to support the relatively high tempo of private customizations. Also, it is common for today’s protocol customization efforts to experience middlebox interference. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework of network-wide orchestration and continuous management of protocol customization for enterprise and data-center networks. By introducing a logically centralized orchestrator along with a layer 4.5 fine-grained device customization solution, our framework will allow operators to deploy and monitor customized flows from a single vantage point, providing timely detection of rogue devices as well as real-time coordination of middlebox traversal. Results from prototyping and experimentation confirm utility of our framework and show that the framework incurs modest processing overhead, at the levels of 3% and 1% for sample customized flows and non-customized flows, respectively.