Transport and security layer protocols make up the backbone of communication between end point devices. In Software Defined Networking (SDN), these protocols play a crucial role in both control-plane and data-plane communications. However, the current transport and security layer protocols: TCP and TLS, are unable to keep up with the pace of SDN application development. For these applications, the TCP/TLS protocol suite generates excessive network overhead. After identifying the main overhead origins, we demonstrate that using QUIC as the SDN transport layer protocol significantly reduces the overhead and improves the efficiency of the network. In this paper, we introduce quicSDN to enable robust, low-overhead communication between the controller and switches. We ran a variety of experiments to highlight quicSDN's benefits, and compared experimental results with transport-layer overhead prediction models. quicSDN's performance is evaluated in terms of network overhead reduction and we also demonstrated quicSDN's connection migration capabilities. First, we compare the differences in controller-switch communication overhead between tcpSDN(SDN over TCP) and quicSDN. Overhead reduction was measured in three scenarios: flow rule installation, queue configuration, and flow rule statistics polling. Second, we compare the connection migration of quicSDN and tcpSDN; QUIC's ability to quickly migrate connections allows for reduced total traffic in comparison to TCP. Overall, our results show that quicSDN outperformed tcpSDN in our SDN scenarios, and as such, QUIC is a promising candidate as an SDN transport layer protocol in the future.

中文翻译：

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QuicSDN：从 TCP 过渡到 QUIC 以实现 SDN 中的南向通信

传输和安全层协议构成了端点设备之间通信的主干。在软件定义网络 (SDN) 中，这些协议在控制平面和数据平面通信中都起着至关重要的作用。然而，目前的传输层和安全层协议：TCP和TLS，都跟不上SDN应用开发的步伐。对于这些应用程序，TCP/TLS 协议套件会产生过多的网络开销。在确定主要开销来源后，我们证明使用 QUIC 作为 SDN 传输层协议可以显着降低开销并提高网络效率。在本文中，我们引入了 quicSDN 来实现控制器和交换机之间的稳健、低开销的通信。我们进行了各种实验来突出 quicSDN 的好处，并将实验结果与传输层开销预测模型进行比较。quicSDN 的性能是根据网络开销减少来评估的，我们还展示了 quicSDN 的连接迁移能力。首先，我们比较了 tcpSDN（SDN over TCP）和 quicSDN 在控制器-交换机通信开销上的差异。在三个场景中衡量开销减少：流规则安装、队列配置和流规则统计轮询。其次，我们比较了quicSDN和tcpSDN的连接迁移；与 TCP 相比，QUIC 快速迁移连接的能力允许减少总流量。总体而言，我们的结果表明，在我们的 SDN 场景中，quicSDN 的性能优于 tcpSDN，因此，QUIC 是未来作为 SDN 传输层协议的有希望的候选者。