Flexible Traffic Engineering: When OpenFlow Meets Multi-Protocol IP-Forwarding

In this letter, we present flexible traffic engineering (F-TE), a solution to achieve highly efficient traffic engineering in a hybrid network where IPv4 and IPv6 protocols co-exist. By leveraging the programmability of OpenFlow (OF), we design the OF system to facilitate IP forwarding interchanging (i.e., switching the packets between IPv4 and IPv6 at each hop according to the network status). The OF system is implemented in a real network testbed. We conduct experiments with video streaming to verify that the proposed F-TE can improve network throughput effectively with adaptive IP interchanging.