A Framework of Controller with Flow Table Cache and Performance Analysis in Software Defined Industrial Networks

Abstract

The industrial internet and industrial 4.0 introduce the new requirements of industrial networks to be more flexible, manageable and scalable. Software Defined Network (SDN) separates control plane and data plane, abstracts the complexity of the network, provides faster network services and more flexible network management, and bring great impact to the traditional industrial networks. However, due to the limit of power and cost in industrial network switches, the scale of flow table of these switches is smaller than the scale of switches in datacenter, which leads to a low flow table hit ratio and heavy load in SDN controller. In this paper, we propose a framework of SDN controller with flow table cache and increase the hit ratio. Based on the framework, a model of SDN controller is proposed and the performance of SDN controller can be analyzed. The simulation shows the analysis results from the model is close to the simulation and the controller with flow table cache is more efficient in software defined industrial networks.