TY - GEN
T1 - Infinite CacheFlow in software-defined networks
AU - Katta, Naga
AU - Alipourfard, Omid
AU - Rexford, Jennifer L.
AU - Walker, David P.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables fine-grained policies for firewalls, load balancers, routers, traffic monitoring, and other functionality. While Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) enables OpenFlow switches to process packets at high speed based on multiple header fields, today's commodity switches support just thousands to tens of thousands of rules. To realize the potential of SDN on this hardware, we need efficient ways to support the abstraction of a switch with arbitrarily large rule tables. To do so, we define a hardware-software hybrid switch design that relies on rule caching to provide large rule tables at low cost. Unlike traditional caching solutions, we neither cache individual rules (to respect rule dependencies) nor compress rules (to preserve the per-rule traffic counts). Instead we ''splice'' long dependency chains to cache smaller groups of rules while preserving the semantics of the network policy. Our design satisfies four core criteria: (1) elasticity (combining the best of hardware and software switches), (2) transparency (faithfully supporting native OpenFlow semantics, including traffic counters), (3) fine-grained rule caching (placing popular rules in the TCAM, despite dependencies on less-popular rules), and (4) adaptability (to enable incremental changes to the rule caching as the policy changes).
AB - Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables fine-grained policies for firewalls, load balancers, routers, traffic monitoring, and other functionality. While Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) enables OpenFlow switches to process packets at high speed based on multiple header fields, today's commodity switches support just thousands to tens of thousands of rules. To realize the potential of SDN on this hardware, we need efficient ways to support the abstraction of a switch with arbitrarily large rule tables. To do so, we define a hardware-software hybrid switch design that relies on rule caching to provide large rule tables at low cost. Unlike traditional caching solutions, we neither cache individual rules (to respect rule dependencies) nor compress rules (to preserve the per-rule traffic counts). Instead we ''splice'' long dependency chains to cache smaller groups of rules while preserving the semantics of the network policy. Our design satisfies four core criteria: (1) elasticity (combining the best of hardware and software switches), (2) transparency (faithfully supporting native OpenFlow semantics, including traffic counters), (3) fine-grained rule caching (placing popular rules in the TCAM, despite dependencies on less-popular rules), and (4) adaptability (to enable incremental changes to the rule caching as the policy changes).
KW - commodity switch
KW - openflow
KW - rule caching
KW - software-defined networking
KW - tcam
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84907015286&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84907015286&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2620728.2620734
DO - 10.1145/2620728.2620734
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84907015286
SN - 9781450329897
T3 - HotSDN 2014 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking
SP - 175
EP - 180
BT - HotSDN 2014 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 3rd ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking, HotSDN 2014
Y2 - 22 August 2014 through 22 August 2014
ER -