TY - JOUR
T1 - STAR
T2 - Preventing flow-table overflow in software-defined networks
AU - Guo, Zehua
AU - Liu, Ruoyan
AU - Xu, Yang
AU - Gushchin, Andrey
AU - Walid, Anwar
AU - Chao, H. Jonathan
PY - 2017/10/9
Y1 - 2017/10/9
N2 - The emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables network innovation and flexible control for network operations. A key component of SDN is the flow table at each switch, which stores flow entries that define how to process the received flows. In a network that has a large number of active flows, flow tables at switches can be easily overflowed, which could cause blocking of new flows or eviction of entries of some active flows. The eviction of active flow entries, however, can severely degrade the network performance and overload the SDN controller. In this paper, we propose SofTware-defined Adaptive Routing (STAR), an online routing scheme that efficiently utilizes limited flow-table resources to maximize network performance. In particular, STAR detects real-time flow-table utilization of each switch, intelligently evicts expired flow entries when needed to accommodate new flows, and selects routing paths for new flows based on flow-table utilizations of switches across the network. Simulation results based on the Spanish backbone network show that, STAR outperforms existing schemes by decreasing the controller's workload for routing new flows by about 87%, reducing packet delay by 49%, and increasing average throughput by 123% on average when the flow-table resource is scarce.
AB - The emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables network innovation and flexible control for network operations. A key component of SDN is the flow table at each switch, which stores flow entries that define how to process the received flows. In a network that has a large number of active flows, flow tables at switches can be easily overflowed, which could cause blocking of new flows or eviction of entries of some active flows. The eviction of active flow entries, however, can severely degrade the network performance and overload the SDN controller. In this paper, we propose SofTware-defined Adaptive Routing (STAR), an online routing scheme that efficiently utilizes limited flow-table resources to maximize network performance. In particular, STAR detects real-time flow-table utilization of each switch, intelligently evicts expired flow entries when needed to accommodate new flows, and selects routing paths for new flows based on flow-table utilizations of switches across the network. Simulation results based on the Spanish backbone network show that, STAR outperforms existing schemes by decreasing the controller's workload for routing new flows by about 87%, reducing packet delay by 49%, and increasing average throughput by 123% on average when the flow-table resource is scarce.
KW - Entry eviction
KW - Flow-table overflow
KW - OpenFlow
KW - SDN
KW - Software-defined networking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019157818&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85019157818&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.comnet.2017.04.046
DO - 10.1016/j.comnet.2017.04.046
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85019157818
VL - 125
SP - 15
EP - 25
JO - Computer Networks
JF - Computer Networks
SN - 1389-1286
ER -