OpenSRN: A Software-defined Semantic Routing Network Architecture

Content-based routing (CBR) attracts much attention due to its routing paradigm, which is based on the contents of messages rather than their destination addresses. However, most existing CBR systems implement the routing strategy by broadcasting the requests of users, which results in very heavy communication traffic. In addition, existing CBR systems cannot take into account the semantics of data resources in different formats, hence it is difficult to achieve intelligent discovery of data resources. In this paper, we propose OpenSRN, a novel architecture of software-defined semantic routing network. OpenSRN decouples the data plane and control plane based on the idea of SDN, which can provide semantic routing network with high efficiency, fine-grained control, as well as flexibility to support future advanced network technologies. Moreover, OpenSRN normalizes various data resources into a high-dimensional semantic space, and correlates the data semantics with their distance information, which can realize the intelligent discovery of internet data. We also discuss some practical challenges in the deployment of OpenSRN.