Integrating an identity-based control plane with the HIMALIS network architecture

The raise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) opens a wide spectrum of improvements for network architectures targeting different problems. It includes the case of those architectures designed to overcome mobility and multi-homing problems in big networks, such as the Internet, as is the case of the HIMALIS network architecture. In this paper we present an approach for HIMALIS to benefit from SDN technologies by changing the way it addresses its control operations. We propose to leverage control operations of the HIMALIS architecture through an identity-based control plane that has been designed following the principles of SDN. Thus, our approach proposes to integrate the main elements of HIMALIS with a controller, which provides enormous benefits to the architecture in general, such as the possibility to perform control operations with global knowledge of the network status and the evolution of the functions provided by the control plane without changing the implementation of the end nodes. Finally, in order to demonstrate those benefits, we have built architectonic models for both HIMALIS and our proposal, executed different simulations with them running on different mobility scenarios, and extracted the results that show clear improvement of our proposal.