ieHDDP: An Integrated Solution for Topology Discovery and Automatic In-Band Control Channel Establishment for Hybrid SDN Environments

In-Band enhanced Hybrid Domain Discovery Protocol (ieHDDP) is a novel integral approach for hybrid Software-Defined Networking (SDN) environments that simultaneously provides a topology discovery service and an autonomous control channel configuration in the band. This contribution is particularly relevant since, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first all-in-one proposal for SDN capable of collecting the entire topology information (type of devices, links, etc.) and establishing in-band control channels at once in hybrid SDN environments (composed by SDN/no-SDN, wired/wireless devices), even with isolated SDN devices. ieHDDP facilitates the integration of heterogeneous networks, for example, in 5G/6G scenarios, and the deployment of SDN devices by using a simple exploration mechanism to gather all the required topological information and learn the necessary routes between the control and data planes at the same time. ieHDDP has been implemented in a well-known SDN software switch and evaluated in a comprehensive set of randomized topologies, acknowledging that ieHDDP is scalable in representative scenarios.