An SDN-based Framework for Managing Internet Exchange Points

Internet Exchange Points (IXP) have become crucial building blocks of today’s networked services, localizing traffic, improving performance, and reducing costs. IXPs span a wide range of business models—for-profit, not-for-profit, and freeof-charge—and thus have diverse business goals. As a result, different IXPs have different requirements on their infrastructure and want to enforce different policies. Unfortunately, despite their success, IXPs face significant infrastructure management challenges like scalability limitations or lack of security. In this paper we present SDIX, an infrastructure management framework for IXPs that uses software-defined networking functionality to provide efficient and flexible primitives that IXPs can use and extend to implement policies. We evaluate SDIX on a realistic IXP infrastructure emulated on Mininet and show how it achieves different goals while simplifying management. We also show that SDIX is deployable on current hardware and can scale to IXPs with thousands of member networks.