Transparent Multi-Hop Protocol Termination

According to Cisco's forecast by the end of 2016 the global annual IP traffic will surpass 1.3 zettabytes and mobile traffic will reach a volume of 11.2 exabytes per month in 2017. Thus, a main requirement for future networks is high reliability and efficiency to cope with the associated quality of service demands. Hence, a vital interaction between error-correction, network technologies and suitable network resource utilization constitute a hard challenge for traffic engineers. In prior work it has been shown that the data distribution with traditional end-to-end schemes is less optimal compared to multi-hop schemes, that is treating network segments individually. In this paper we present a theoretical analysis based on Shannon's coding theorem that concludes a promising data-rate reduction from the segmentation approach. Additionally, we propose a transparent protocol termination mechanism for software-defined networks (SDN) that allows to segment an end-to-end transmission path without any modification at the sending or receiving devices. Eventually, a detailed implementation approach for SDNs running OpenFlow is given.