BUFFALO: Bloom filter forwarding architecture for large organizations

Minlan Yu, Alex Fabrikant, Jennifer L. Rexford

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

93 Scopus citations

Abstract

In enterprise and data center networks, the scalability of the data plane becomes increasingly challenging as forwarding tables and link speeds grow. Simply building switches with larger amounts of faster memory is not appealing, since high-speed memory is both expensive and power hungry. Implementing hash tables in SRAM is not appealing either because it requires significant overprovisioning to ensure that all forwarding table entries fit. Instead, we propose the BUFFALO architecture, which uses a small SRAM to store one Bloom filter of the addresses associated with each outgoing link. We provide a practical switch design leveraging flat addresses and shortest-path routing. BUFFALO gracefully handles false positives without reducing the packet-forwarding rate, while guaranteeing that packets reach their destinations with bounded stretch with high probability. We tune the sizes of Bloom filters to minimize false positives for a given memory size. We also handle routing changes and dynamically adjust Bloom filter sizes using counting Bloom filters in slow memory. Our extensive analysis, simulation, and prototype implementation in kernel-level Click show that BUFFALO significantly reduces memory cost, increases the scalability of the data plane, and improves packet-forwarding performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCoNEXT'09 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies
Pages313-324
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event2009 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT'09 - Rome, Italy
Duration: Dec 1 2009Dec 4 2009

Publication series

NameCoNEXT'09 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

Other

Other2009 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT'09
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityRome
Period12/1/0912/4/09

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • Bloom filter
  • Enterprise and data center networks
  • Packet forwarding

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