Software Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining momentum with the support of major manufacturers. While it brings flexibility in the management of flows within the data center fabric, this flexibility comes at the cost of smaller routing table capacities. In this paper, we investigate compression techniques to reduce the forwarding information base (FIB) of SDN switches. We validate our algorithm, called MINNIE, on a real testbed able to emulate a 20 switches fat tree architecture. We demonstrate that even with a small number of clients, the limit in terms of number of rules is reached if no compression is performed, increasing the delay of all new incoming flows. MINNIE, on the other hand, reduces drastically the number of rules that need to be stored with a limited impact on the packet loss rate. We also evaluate the actual switching and reconfiguration times and the delay introduced by the communications with the controller.
Abstract-Transport protocols have the difficult task of providing reliability and fair sharing of the bandwidth to end-users. In this paper, we focus on very dynamic high-speed networks where the available best-effort bandwidth for regulated traffics can vary over time. Foreseen problems introduced by such highly dynamic environments are inefficiency due to convergence time and high amount of packet losses due to dramatic reductions of the available bandwidth. Therefore end-to-end solutions show their limitations for exploiting the current very high-speed infrastructures. XCP is a promising approach as the evolution of the sender congestion window size is dictated by the routers. However, as the XCP sender relies on the returned ACKs to adapt its congestion window size, XCP performances can be affected if many losses occur on the reverse path. This paper proposes to calculate the congestion window size at the receiver side and to overcome the problem of ACk losses. The result is a more robust XCP transport protocol, capable of achieving a high level of performance in very dynamic high-speed networks, thus able to function in a broader range of network conditions.
XCP is a transport protocol that uses the assistance of specialized routers to very accurately determine the available bandwidth along the path from the source to the destination. In this way, XCP efficiently controls the sender's congestion window size thus avoiding the traditional slow-start and congestion avoidance phase. However, XCP requires the collaboration of all the routers on the data path which is almost impossible to achieve in an incremental deployment scenario of XCP. It has been shown that XCP behaves badly, worse than TCP, in the presence of non-XCP routers thus limiting dramatically the benefit of having XCP running in some parts of the network. In this paper, we address this problem and propose XCP-i which is operable on an internetwork consisting of XCP routers and traditional IP routers without loosing the benefit of the XCP control laws. The simulation results on a number of topologies that reflect the various scenario of incremental deployment on the Internet show that although XCP-i performances depend on available bandwidth estimation accuracy, XCP-i still outperforms TCP on high-speed links.
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