QuicSDN: Transitioning from TCP to QUIC for Southbound Communication in SDNs
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Transport and security layer protocols make up the backbone of communication between end point devices. In Software Defined Networking (SDN), these protocols play a crucial role in both control-plane and data-plane communications. However, the current transport and security layer protocols: TCP and TLS, are unable to keep up with the pace of SDN application development. For these applications, the TCP/TLS protocol suite generates excessive network overhead. After identifying the main overhead origins, we demonstrate that using QUIC as the SDN transport layer protocol significantly reduces the overhead and improves the efficiency of the network. In this paper, we introduce quicSDN to enable robust, low-overhead communication between the controller and switches. We ran a variety of experiments to highlight quicSDN's benefits, and compared experimental results with transport-layer overhead prediction models. quicSDN's performance is evaluated in terms of network overhead reduction and we also demonstrated quicSDN's connection migration capabilities. First, we compare the differences in controller-switch communication overhead between tcpSDN(SDN over TCP) and quicSDN. Overhead reduction was measured in three scenarios: flow rule installation, queue configuration, and flow rule statistics polling. Second, we compare the connection migration of quicSDN and tcpSDN; QUIC's ability to quickly migrate connections allows for reduced total traffic in comparison to TCP. Overall, our results show that quicSDN outperformed tcpSDN in our SDN scenarios, and as such, QUIC is a promising candidate as an SDN transport layer protocol in the future.
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