Give me a broadcast-free network

In computer networking, broadcasting means to transmit a packet to every device in one broadcast domain. Broadcasting is widely used in many protocols, like ARP [1], DHCP [2] and so on. The main reason is that in a distributed network, each node has no knowledge about the whole network. Therefore, the node has to use broadcast ways to build its knowledge. However, for those who do not need to get or answer the broadcast message, the broadcast message is nothing but a noise packet. In this paper, we propose a broadcast handling framework in software defined networking. With this framework, a network manager can minimize the broadcast behavior in the network without impacting hosts. We also implement some broadcast handling modules in this work. We evaluate our framework's performance by comparing our framework with legacy networks and other SDN network platforms. We also discuss the impact of our framework to the spanning tree protocol.