Improving SDN Scalability with Protocol-Oblivious Source Routing: A System-Level Study

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2018

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) has been considered as a break-through technology for the next-generation Internet. It enables fine-grained flow control that can make networks more flexible and programmable. However, this might lead to scalability issues due to the possible flow state explosion in SDN switches. SDN-based source routing can reduce the volume of flow-tables significantly by encoding the path information into packet headers. In this paper, we leverage the protocol-oblivious forwarding instruction set to design protocol-oblivious source routing (POSR), which is a protocol-independent, bandwidth-efficient, and flow-table-saving packet forwarding technique. We lay out the packet format for POSR, come up with the packet processing pipelines for realizing unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and implement POSR in a protocol-oblivious forwarding-enabled SDN network system. Experiments are then performed in a network testbed, which consists of 14 stand-alone SDN switches, to validate the advantages of POSR. Specifically, we compare POSR with several OpenFlow-based benchmarks for unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and confirm that POSR can reduce flow-table utilization effectively, shorten path setup latency and expedite link failure recovery.

Identifier

85032453729 (Scopus)

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2017.2766159

ISSN

19324537

First Page

275

Last Page

288

Issue

1

Volume

15

Grant

61371117

Fund Ref

National Natural Science Foundation of China

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS