An OpenFlow Compliant Smart Switch for monitoring applications

In this paper we propose a novel hardware-software co-design vision that aims at enhancing flexibility and reusability of hardware based packet forwarding engines. In particular, we move on the path of the well-known OpenFlow architecture. However, although such approach is certainly powerful, it is biased towards routing-related applications: its main goal is to allow the software control plane to arbitrarily route a packet flow. We believe that a similar paradigm, encompassing high performance packet forwarding hardware driven by a flexible software control plane, may be beneficial even to other kinds of applications, like monitoring and measurements. Unfortunately, the primitives that the OpenFlow protocol provides are in many cases not flexible enough for such purposes. For this reason, we propose a flexible packet forwarding architecture based on regular expression that, besides enabling standard-compliant OpenFlow switching, can be easily reconfigured through its control plane to support other kinds of applications. We implemented a working prototype of out architecture by using the well-known NetFPGA board.