Development of the Protocol for Inter-Autonomous Systems Routing in Software Defined Networks

As technologically evolving networks rapidly deploy software defined networks (SDN) in a bid to acquire its benefits, routing traffic between autonomous systems (ASs) within SDN still remains a challenge [1]. This is because border gateway protocol version 4 (BGP version 4) is designed for less flexible and concentrated networks which experiences throughput, delay, multi-dimension routing, scalability and convergence issues when used between ASs within SDN [17]. Thus, this paper presents the developed protocol called the inter-autonomous systems (IASs) routing protocol that uses routing engine (RE) to route traffic between ASs in SDN. The developed protocol has flexible routing capability which routes SDN packets without the need to search for the optimal paths that resolves delays, scalability and convergence problems. The flexible routing capability also provide multi-dimension routing that solves single dimension routing exhibited by BGP version 4 when used between ASs in SDN. The results show that, the developed protocol provides better throughput when compared to BGP version 4. Including artificial intelligence (AI) to the developed protocol improves its performance extremely high. This is due to the learning mechanism integrated in the protocol which ensures that packets are propagated error free, lossless and with minimum delays.