Enabling active flow manipulation in silicon-based network forwarding engines

A significant challenge in today's Internet is the ability to efficiently i ncorporate customizable network intelligence in commercial high performance network devices. This paper tackles the challenge by introducing the Activ e Flow Manipulation (AFM) mechanism, a key enabling technology of the progr ammable networking platform Openet, AFM enhances the control intelligence o f network devices through programmability, With AFM, customer network servi ces can exercise active network control by identifying specific flows and a pplying particular actions thereby altering network behavior in real-time. These services are offered through Openet dynamically deployed in the CPU-b ased control plane of the network node and are closely coupled with the sil icon-based forwarding plane, without negatively impacting forwarding perfor mance. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by four experiment al applications on commercial network nodes.