Content as a Network Primitive

The current functionality supported by OpenFlowbased software defined networking (SDN) includes switching, routing, tunneling, and some basic fire walling while operating on traffic flows. However, the semantics of SDN do not allow for other operations on the traffic, nor does it allow operations at a higher granularity. In this work, we describe a method to expand the SDN framework to add other network primitives. In particular, we present a method to integrate different network elements (like cache, proxy etc). Here, we focus on storage and caching, but our method could be expanded to other functionality seamlessly. We also present a method to identify content so as to perform per-content policy, as opposed to per flow policy. We have implemented the proposed mechanisms to demonstrate its feasibility.