QuicSDN: Transitioning from TCP to QUIC for Southbound Communication in SDNs

TL;DR

This paper introduces quicSDN, a novel architecture replacing TCP with QUIC for southbound communication in SDNs, demonstrating improved performance through analytical and empirical evaluation.

Contribution

It presents the quicSDN architecture that transitions SDN southbound communication from TCP to QUIC, enhancing scalability and efficiency.

Findings

quicSDN reduces communication overhead compared to TCP-based SDN

Empirical results show improved latency and throughput with quicSDN

Analytical analysis confirms performance benefits of QUIC in SDNs

Abstract

In Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), the control plane and data plane communicate for various purposes, such as applying configurations and collecting statistical data. While various methods have been proposed to reduce the overhead and enhance the scalability of SDNs, the impact of the transport layer protocol used for southbound communication has not been investigated. Existing SDNs rely on TCP (and TLS) to enforce reliability and security. In this paper, we show that the use of TCP imposes a considerable overhead on southbound communication, identify the causes of this overhead, and demonstrate how replacing TCP with QUIC can enhance the performance of this communication. We introduce the quicSDN architecture, enabling southbound communication in SDNs via the QUIC protocol. We present a reference architecture based on the standard, most widely used protocols by the SDN community and show how the controller and switch are revamped to facilitate this transition. We compare, both analytically and empirically, the performance of quicSDN versus the traditional SDN architecture and confirm the superior performance of quicSDN.