Lightweight Flow‐Based Policy Enforcement for SDN‐Based Multi‐Domain Communication

Although software‐defined networking (SDN) is commonly employed for intra‐domain communication, inter‐domain communication still heavily relies on conventional routing methods, specifically BGP‐based routers. The BGP router plays a crucial role in managing control and data planes, but this traditional approach hinders the exploitation of SDN advantages. Previous studies demonstrated the use of BGP for inter‐domain and end‐to‐end communication. This paper advocates for the adoption of a fully SDN‐based data plane packet switching strategy through the introduction of LPEES, a lightweight policy framework tailored for SDN‐based inter‐domain communication. LPEES strategically confines BGP's functionality to the control plane, preserving SDN benefits. Evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of LPEES compared to the BGP routing approach, as measured by throughput and various network quality of service (QoS) metrics. Additionally, LPEES streamlines inter‐domain communication by utilizing a trust‐based routing policy approach that can establish trust between communicating domains. The presented solution's main advantage is that it loosens the burden on the administrator by requiring less human interference to check the inter‐domain communication security and privacy. Our evaluations show LPEES outperform the BGP‐based in terms of throughput as LPEES achieves a ∼$$ \sim $$27 Gbps versus ∼$$ \sim $$22 Gbps in the traditional approach. Based on our experiments, LPEES also enhances the communication delay by an average of ∼$$ \sim $$17% compared to the traditional BGP‐based approach.