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Port Based Capacity Extensions (PBCEs): Improving SDNs Flow Table Scalability

, and . 2016 28th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 28), 01, page 225-233. Würzburg, Germany, (September 2016)
DOI: 10.1109/ITC-28.2016.139

Abstract

Software-defined networks (SDNs) come with great promises regarding flexible operation of networks. A key component within SDN-switches is the flow table which holds the rules that determine how data streams are handled. The flow table, however, is a scarce resource with a rather limited rule capacity. To soften this well-known hassle, PBCE (Port Based Capacity Extension) provides the possibility to delegate flows to a so-called extension switch (e.g., neighboring switch) in order to utilize flow table resources of this switch. Delegation is performed without breaking control plane transparency, i.e., without interfering with established SDN applications. To do so, PBCE uses flow rule aggregation based on ingress ports and a small set of predefined rules at the initial switch that are needed to redirect incoming flows to a dynamically chosen output port. In this paper, we present the PBCE delegation architecture for OpenFlow-based SDNs along with a basic mechanism for flow table capacity outsourcing. A prototypical implementation and first promising performance results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. Within this paper, we focus on flow table scalability, the concept of PBCEs can, however, be applied to other delegation scenarios.

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