OpenFlow: Extension for OpenFlow and its Implementation

The Internet has made great success and big progress. However, the network-layer of Internet and the network devices in Internet have been relatively stagnant. Few changes or improvements have been made in last forty years, which is a stark contrast to the prosperity of the application-layer of the Internet. OpenFlow aims to enable innovation for the network-layer and network devices, which decouples the traditional network devices and rebuilds each module of the devices in an open and standardized way. But there are still some challenges that need to be overcome before OpenFlow can become more practicable and more usable, and ultimately, achieve larger scale commercial applications. Based on our analysis of OpenFlow, we proposed some extensions for OpenFlow (OpenFlow) in this paper, including these four aspects: standard hardware extension, control mode extension, communication interface extension, and low-cost FlowTable realization. Next, the implementation details of OpenFlow in a commercial router are described, and finally, two new applications based on OpenFlow are demonstrated. We believe that OpenFlow will help to speed up the business development of OpenFlow and promote its large-scale use and applications.