Paper Info
Title
Applying Buffer to SDN Switches: Benefits Analysis and Mechanism Design
Abstract
Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) is progressively dominating the dynamic management for timely network trouble shooting and fine grained traffic scheduling in data center networks. One critical issue in SDN is to reduce the communication overhead between the switches and the controller. Such overhead is mainly caused by handling miss-match packets, because for each miss-match packet, a switch will send a request to the controller asking for forwarding rule. Existing approaches to address this problem generally need to deploy intermediate proxy or authority switches to hold rule copies, so as to reduce the number of requests sent to the controller. In this paper, we argue that using the intrinsic buffer in a SDN switch can also greatly reduce the communication overhead without using additional devices. If a switch buffers each miss-match packet, only a few header fields instead of the entire packet are required to be sent to the controller. Experiment results show that this can reduce 78.7 percent control traffic and 37 percent controller overhead at the cost of increasing only 5.6 percent switch overhead on average. If the proposed flow-granularity buffer mechanism is adopted, only one request message needs to be sent to the controller for a new flow with many arrival packets. Thus the control traffic and controller overhead can be further reduced by 64 percent and 35.7 percent respectively on average without increasing the switch overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TCC.2018.2846620
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Software defined networking,data center networks,communication overhead,switch,buffer
Journal
9
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2168-7161
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fuliang Li12610.51
Jiannong Cao25226425.12
Xingwei Wang31025154.16
Yinchu Sun431.42
Tian Pan500.34
Xuefeng Liu622.10