Scalable Flow-Based Networking With DIFANE

Ideally, enterprise administrators could specify fine-grain policies that drive how the underlying switches forward, drop, and measure traffic. However, existing techniques for flow-based networking rely too heavily on centralized controller software that installs rules reactively, based on the first packet of each flow. In this paper, the authors propose DIFANE, a scalable and efficient solution that keeps all traffic in the data plane by selectively directing packets through intermediate switches that store the necessary rules.