SDUDP: A Reliable UDP-Based Transmission Protocol over SDN

The recent rapid development of Web technology, multimedia content, and interactive data has considerably expanded the size of the Internet transmissions. Benefiting from the paradigm-shifting technology of software defined networking (SDN), the administrators are now able to easily manage network flows by customizing flow rules over SDN. Inspired by this, we propose a UDP-based reliable transmission framework to improve efficiency of transmission control protocol (TCP) transmission on an SDN-enabled network. The main idea of our framework is to convert the TCP transmission into UDP packets to decrease the overhead during communications, such as handshaking, acknowledgment, and header overhead while using TCP. To guarantee reliability, we have leveraged the power of SDN to designate packets under our protocol to flow in predefined routes and monitor them to avoid possible packet loss. Our proposal is composed of a series of designs and implementations, including the packet format transformations, packet buffering, and retransmission mechanisms on switches. For users, this means that they are transmitting data with TCP, while the overhead of the TCP traffic is reduced significantly through a reliable and lightweight UDP transmission mechanism on the SDN-enabled network. Our evaluation results show that our framework provides a more efficient bandwidth usage and guarantees the reliability of packets as in TCP transmissions.