Software Defined Networking based Routing Firewall

A router's main function is to allow communication between different networks as quickly as possible and in efficient manner. The communication can be between LAN or between LAN and WAN. A firewall's function is to restrict unwanted traffic. In big networks, routers and firewall tasks are performed by different network devices. But in small networks, we want both functions on same device i.e. one single device performing both routing and firewalling. We call these devices as routing firewall. In Traditional networks, the devices are already available. But the next generation networks will be powered by Software Defined Networks. For wide adoption of SDN, we need northbound SDN applications such as routers, load balancers, firewalls, proxy servers, Deep packet inspection devices, routing firewalls running on OpenFlow based physical and virtual switches. But the SDN is still in early stage, so still there is very less availability of these applications. There already exist simple L3 Learning application which provides very elementary router function and also simple stateful firewalls providing basic access control. In this paper, we are implementing one SDN Routing Firewall Application which will perform both the routing and firewall function.