Transforming a Traditional Home Gateway into a Hardware-accelerated SDN Switch

<p>Nowadays, traditional home gateways must support increasingly complex applications while keeping their cost reasonably low.<br />Software Defined Networking (SDN) would simplify the management of those devices, but such an approach is typically reserved for new hardware devices, specifically engineered for this paradigm.<br />As a consequence, typical SDN-based home gateway performs the switching in software, resulting in non-negligible performance degradation.<br />In this paper, we provide our experience and findings of adding the OpenFlow support into a non-OpenFlow compatible home gateway, exploiting the possible hardware speedup available in the existing platform.<br />We present our solution that transparently offloads a portion of the OpenFlow rule into the hardware, while keeping the remaining ones in software, being able to support the presence of multiple hardware tables with a different set of features.<br />Moreover, we illustrate the design choices used to implement the functionalities required by the OpenFlow protocol (e.g., packet-in, packet-out messages) and finally, we evaluate the resulting architecture, showing the significant advantage in terms of performance that can be achieved by exploiting the underlying hardware, while maintaining an SDN-type ability to program and to instantiate desired network operations from a central controller.</p>