Infinite CacheFlow in software-defined networks

Naga Katta, Omid Alipourfard, Jennifer L. Rexford, David P. Walker

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

145 Scopus citations

Abstract

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).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationHotSDN 2014 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages175-180
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781450329897
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event3rd ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking, HotSDN 2014 - Chicago, IL, United States
Duration: Aug 22 2014Aug 22 2014

Publication series

NameHotSDN 2014 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking

Other

Other3rd ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking, HotSDN 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago, IL
Period8/22/148/22/14

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Software

Keywords

  • commodity switch
  • openflow
  • rule caching
  • software-defined networking
  • tcam

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