Investigation of Security and QoS on SDN Firewall Using MAC Filtering

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the latest trend in the networking domain. In SDN, the control plane is decoupled from the data plane in network devices and controlled by the centralized controller using the OpenFlow Protocol. As the centralized controller does all the control functions, strong security support is mandatory. Firewall can be an effective means to protectthe SDN controller from network security threats. The firewall rules can be predefined by using either the IPaddress or the MAC address filtering. In this paper, we propose afirewall implementation for SDN using the MAC filtering. Then, we compare the average packet delay performance for both IP filtering and MAC filtering firewall techniques. The results show that the security support (packet allow/deny) is pretty much the same in both types of firewall technique, whereas the MAC filtering firewall outperforms the IP filtering firewall for thedelay performance analysis.