An Efficient Label-Based Packet Forwarding Scheme in Software Defined Networks

摘要

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) attracts the attention of many researchers in the academic and industry. OpenFlow protocol is a solution of SDN. In OpenFlow version 1.3, there are 40 match fields. This makes the design of switch more complicated. Casado et al. describe a new network architecture, called fabric network [2]. They separate the network elements into edge switches and core switches. Edge switches tag a label onto packet header, and core switches use this label to perform lookup. In this paper, we propose a scheme called Path_label switching. In this scheme, core switch only uses one field to perform lookup. In order to reduce the number of rules in edge switches, we encode the output port number of the last hop into MPLS field. We also propose a scheme to minimize the number of rules in fat-tree topology. In our scheme, the number of rules in core and aggregation switches is the same as the number of ports. We use Mininet to construct the experiments. We will show that our proposed scheme needs much less number of rules than other methods in leaf-spine and fat-tree topologies.