A Software-Defined Address Resolution Proxy

Jun Li, Zeping Gu, Yongmao Ren, Haibo Wu, Shanshan Shi

Abstract: Ethernet plays an important role in the layer 2 network. Unfortunately, the tremendous Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcast traffic among massive hosts limits the scale of Ethernet. Recently, Software-Defined Network (SDN) has been proposed to suppress broadcast traffic by centralized control. However, existing approaches based on SDN suffer from an adaptability limitation as they cannot independently obtain ARP table entries. In this paper, we propose SDARP, a Software-Defined Address Resolution Proxy, to suppress broadcast traffic by centrally processing all ARP packets. To overcome the adaptability limitation, SDARP centrally obtains and maintains ARP table entries by independently resolving the header of ARP messages. SDARP is a SDN application. We prototype SDARP based on the open-source SDN controller RYU, and conduct experiments on the Mininet-based virtual testbed. The emulation results demonstrate that SDARP is transparent to hosts, effectively reduces ARP traffic to 7.1%, eliminates the broadcast storm and reduces the response time of the Internet Control Message Protocol to 35.9%.