Design and Demonstration of High-Throughput Protocol Oblivious Packet Forwarding to Support Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a promising technology that can resolve the challenges faced by vehicular networks. However, the OpenFlow-based SDN implementations can only provide a protocol-dependent data plane. This can restrict the effectiveness of software-defined vehicular networks, since special-purpose protocols that have not been standardized in OpenFlow specifications are used frequently in vehicular networks. To address this issue, this paper studies how to realize a protocol-independent data plane by leveraging the protocol oblivious forwarding (POF). Specifically, we present the design of a software-based POF switch (PVS) that supports runtime protocol customization in principle. We implement PVS in a switch box, and propose a flow table management scheme to ensure high-throughput packet forwarding. The experimental results verify that PVS can achieve line-rate packet forwarding at 10 Gbps when the packets' size is 512 B, and the proposed flow table management scheme is effective.