Achieving Fast Loop-Free Updates With Ingress Port in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Due to the distributed and asynchronous nature in data plane, the packets can be forwarded into a loop during routing updates. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) enable a controller to schedule the update operations of routing rules in a loop-free manner. However, the existing rule replacement mechanism cannot give an efficient solution for large-scale update scenarios. In this paper, we make use of the ingress port field in forwarding rules to design a loop-free update scheme, Inport-Matching Update (IMU), for per-flow and destination-based unicast, which significantly improves efficiency of solving update scenarios and reduces update rounds. In both our proposed and previous mechanisms, a subproblem called Rule Replacement Scheduling (RRS) problem needs to be solved and we prove that the scale of RRS problem can be reduced at least by half. Moreover, we use the inclusion-exclusion principle to rigorously prove that the probability that an RRS problem under IMU has a trivial solution, i.e., one round, is always higher than 83.7%, given a random per-flow unicast update scenario with ingress port rules. Experimental results show that our proposed Inport-Matching Update mechanism remarkably reduces the average number of rounds and runtime for solving the RRS problem compared to the existing rule replacement mechanism.