A forwarding-rule multiplexing mechanism for software-defined networks

What is it about?

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a promising network paradigm that separates the control plane and data plane in the network. It has shown great advantages in simplifying network management such that new functions can be easily supported without physical access to the network switches. However, Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM), as a critical hardware storing rules for high-speed packet processing in SDN-enabled devices, can be supplied to each device with very limited quantity because it is expensive and energy-consuming. To efficiently use TCAM resources, we propose a rule multiplexing scheme, in which the same set of rules deployed on each node apply to the whole flow of a session going through but towards different paths.

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Why is it important?

Based on the proposed rule-multiplexing scheme, we study the rule placement problem with the objective of minimizing rule space occupation for multiple unicast sessions under QoS constraints. We formulate the optimization problem jointly considering routing engineering and rule placement under both existing and our rule multiplexing schemes. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows. (a) Via an extensive review of the state-of-the-art work, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the non-routing-rules-oriented RM-based rules placement problem. (b) Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to show that our proposed rule multiplexing scheme can significantly reduce rule space occupation by 10%~35% under QoS constraints, compared with the traditional approaches.

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