Protocol-oblivious forwarding

In Software-defined networking, Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF) means the forwarding plane is not hard-coded with any specific packet protocol handling functionality and is not aware of the packet protocol format. The packet processing (e.g. parsing, editing, and forwarding) is fully defined by controller software.
Today’s SDN forwarding elements (FE) need to retain protocol-specific function primitives for packet processing and forwarding. New service deployment often needs forklift upgrades to the FEs, which are slow and costly.
Protocol Oblivious Forwarding<ref name = "pofpaper" /><ref name = "pofweb" /> is an SDN forwarding plane technology that aims to remove the FEs from depending on any specific protocols and allows an active and stateful forwarding plane. This is achieved by defining an open interface between the SDN controller and the FEs and designing a set of generic flow instructions that can be used to program the forwarding behavior. With POF, FEs become future-proof and are able to handle any packet processing and forwarding tasks defined by the controller software.
POF is a promising direction to evolve OpenFlow towards OpenFlow 2.0. It offers the ultimate flexibility and programmability to SDN. Service providers will benefit from this technology through using standard, simple, and future-proof FEs to save CAPEX/OPEX and quickly deploying customized and innovative services in the form of application software to generate new revenues.
While POF has been implemented using NPU and CPU, a recent paper<ref name = "MAT" /> proposed an optimized FE chip architecture that is suitable to support efficient POF implementation.

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