Automatic rule installation in case of policy change in software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged recently as a new network architecture. It implements both control and management planes at centralized controller and data plane at forwarding devices. Therefore, SDN helps to simplify network management and improves network programmability. Changes in network policies occur frequently by making modifications at controller. However, in existing approaches, the rules installed at switches before policy change at controller are not modified. This can cause violation of network policy by packets. To address this problem, this paper presents a new approach that stores the rules generated at controller. After detecting the change in policy, the proposed approach finds the rules that will be affected by policy change by examining stored rules at controller. Then the affected rules are removed from the forwarding devices. Simulation results reveal that our proposed approach provides less packets violation ratio and normalized traffic overhead as compared to existing approach. Therefore, the proposed approach increases network performance and efficiency.