Source routing with protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) to enable efficient e-Health data transfers

It has already been confirmed that software-defined networking (SDN) can make the networks more programmable, adaptive and application aware. However, due to the large-scale and geographically-distributed nature of wide-area networks (WAN), the scalability could become a critical issue if we incorporate SDN for WANs (i.e., realizing SD-WANs). In this paper, we design and implement a novel network system that can leverage source routing with the protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) to facilitate efficient e-Health data transfers with low setup latency. We develop the POF-based source routing protocol to realize a pipeline based packet processing procedure, which can replace the table-lookup based approach in traditional SDN networks and make the forwarding plane more efficient. The proposed scheme is demonstrated experimentally, and the results verify that with it, the flow-tables installed in each core switches in a POF-controlled SD-WAN can be minimized and the path setup latency of traffic flows can be reduced significantly as well.