Pushing Software Defined Networking to the Access

As Software Defined Networking (SDN) and in particular OpenFlow (OF) availability increases, the desire to extend its use in other scenarios appears. It would be appealing to include substantial parts of the network under OF control but until recently this implied replacing much of the hardware with OF enabled versions. There are some cases, such as access networks in which the benefits could be considerable but deal with a great amount of legacy equipment that is difficult to replace. In this case an alternative method of enabling OF on these devices would be useful. In this paper we describe an architecture and software which could enable OF on many access technologies with minimal changes. The software has been written and tested on a Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Network (GEPON). The approach is engineered to be easily ported to any access technology with minimal requirements made on that hardware.