SmartPacket: Re-Distributing the Routing Intelligence among Network Components in SDNs

Abstract: In this work, a new region-based, multipath-enabled packet routing is presented and called SmartPacket Routing. The proposed approach provides several opportunities to re-distribute the smartness and decision making among various elements of a network including the packets themselves toward providing a decentralized solution for SDNs. This would bring efficiency and scalability, and therefore also lower environmental footprint for the ever-growing networks. In particular, a region-based representation of the network topology is proposed which is then used to describe the routing actions along the possible paths for a packet flow. In addition to a region stack that expresses a partial or full regional path of a packet, QoS requirements of the packet (or its associated flow) is considered in the packet header in order to enable possible QoS-aware routing at region level without requiring a centralized controller.