Abstract-A challenge in the adoption of the OpenFlow (OF)-based SDN paradigm is related to the limited number of OF rules supported by the network devices. The technology used to implement the OF rules is TCAM, which is expensive and power demanding. Due to this, the network devices are either very costly or they can support a very limited number of OF rules. One way to cope with this limitation, is to perform the same logic but with fewer OF rules in the devices. As a demonstration of this operational strategy, the current paper proposes a service for traffic flow aggregation which reduces the number of OF rules needed in the network devices, without impacting the control plane logic. The proposed traffic flow aggregation service is tested on a set of topologies specific to the backhaul network, since they aggregate a large amount of traffic flows. The results illustrate significant reductions in the number of OF rules in network devices, thus a lower demand on TCAM capacity.
Abstract-The OpenFlow (OF) protocol is widely used in Software Defined Networking (SDN) to realize the communication between the controller and forwarding devices. OF allows great flexibility in managing traffic flows. However, OF alone is not enough to build more complex SDN services that require complete control and management of the data plane (e.g. configurations of ports, queues, etc.). The current work contributes to the SDN ecosystem with the implementation of a plugin for the OVSDB protocol, for an existing SDN controller (SDNC). OVSDB complements OF with management functionality such as configuration of devices, ports, queues, etc. An Application Programming Interface (API) for dynamic configuration of QoS resources in the network devices is implemented herein, by using the capabilities of OVSDB. Further, the paper demonstrates the possibility to create network services with coarse granularity on top of the fine granular services exposed by the QoS configuration API at the SDNC. A series of tests emphasize the capabilities and the performance of the implemented QoS configuration API.
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