BareFlow: A Pure Layer-2 Data-Driven Protocol for Transparent Plug-and-Play Routing

In modern dynamic and heterogeneous network environments, the limitations of traditional routing algorithms have become increasingly apparent. While these classical methods have provided robust solutions over decades, they fall short in meeting the current demands for scalability, adaptability, and simplicity. In contrast, Layer-2 networking offers a decentralized, plug-and-play paradigm that is well suited for rapid deployment across diverse scenarios, including data center networks or softwarized services for edge computing networks. However, existing solutions suffer from prolonged convergence times and high control overhead, which hampers their efficiency in dynamic topologies and deviates from the autoconfiguration and plug-and- play essence of a pure Layer-2 approach. In this paper, we present BareFlow, a novel pure switching mechanism that obviates the need for explicit control messages by operating without modifying packet headers. We evaluated BareFlow using the NS-3 simulator in a Spine-Leaf topology (usual in data center networks) under various traffic distributions. These preliminary results demonstrate that BareFlow achieves near-maximum throughput for large flows and efficiently manages flow completion times across different flow sizes. These findings highlight the potential of BareFlow as a scalable, self-configuring solution, offering efficient and adaptive forwarding with significantly reduced overhead, which is particularly suited for edge computing environments, in which devices are usually constrained in capacity.