RuleTailor: Optimizing Flow Table Updates in OpenFlow Switches With Rule Transformations

摘要

Software-defined networking (SDN) provides flexible network control, which has enabled new, more complex network control mechanisms. These approaches impose high demands on flow updates in OpenFlow switches. Existing SDN controllers and firmware have been optimized for high-speed network updates, but specific switch implementations differ in their behavior. Previous optimization schemes for updates ignore the diversity of instruction types and switch behavior. In this paper, we present RuleTailor, an efficient, measurement-based optimization framework for SDN flow updates, to overcome these limitations. In contrast to other measurement-based optimization frameworks, RuleTailor uses new techniques, such as instruction type transformation, pseudo deletion, and match field distance, which can work in both the control plane and the data plane. Our evaluation shows that RuleTailor achieves a performance of fewer than 12 milliseconds per update in a content-addressable flow table with 1k entries, outperforming the state-of-the-art measurement-based framework, Tango, by a factor of 10.