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Article
Auto-Configuration of ACL Policy in Case of Topology Change in Hybrid SDN
IEEE Access
  • Rashid Amin, COMSATS University Islamabad
  • Nadir Shah, COMSATS University Islamabad
  • Babar Shah, Zayed University
  • Omar Alfandi, Zayed University
ORCID Identifiers

0000-0003-1173-4272

Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2016
Abstract

© 2016 IEEE. Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a new network architecture, which decouples both the control and management planes from data plane at forwarding devices. However, SDN deployment is not widely adopted due to the budget constraints of organizations. This is because organizations are always reluctant to invest too much budget to establish a new network infrastructure from scratch. One feasible solution is to deploy a limited number of SDN-enabled devices along with traditional (legacy) network devices in the network of an organization by incrementally replacing traditional network by SDN, which is called hybrid SDN (Hybrid SDN) architecture. Network management and control in Hybrid SDN are vital tasks that require significant effort and resources. Manual handling of these tasks is error prone. Whenever network topology changes, network policies (e.g., access control list) configured at the interfaces of forwarding devices (switches/routers) may be violated. That creates severe security threats for the whole network and degrades the network performance. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Hybrid SDN that auto-detects the interfaces of forwarding devices and network policies that are affected due to change in network topology. In the proposed approach, we model network-wide policy and local policy at forwarding device using a three-tuple and a six-tuple, respectively. We compute graph to represent the topology of the network. By using graph difference technique, we detect a possible change in topology. In the case of topology change, we verify policy for updated topology by traversing tree using six-tuple. If there is any violation in policy implementation, then affected interfaces are indicated and policies that need to be configured are also indicated. Then, policies are configured on the updated topology according to specification in an improved way. Simulation results show that our proposed approach enhances the network efficiency in term of successful packet delivery ratio, the ratio of packets that violated the policy and normalized overhead.

Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Disciplines
Keywords
  • Communication switching,
  • graph difference,
  • policy configuration,
  • Topology change,
  • tree
Scopus ID

85015249228

Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Indexed in Scopus
Yes
Open Access
Yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series
Citation Information
Rashid Amin, Nadir Shah, Babar Shah and Omar Alfandi. "Auto-Configuration of ACL Policy in Case of Topology Change in Hybrid SDN" IEEE Access Vol. 4 (2016) p. 9437 - 9450 ISSN: <p><a href="https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/issn/2169-3536" target="_blank">2169-3536</a></p>
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/omar-alfandi/51/