Optimizing the performance of OpenFlow Protocol over QUIC

Abstract

In the last decade, Software-defined networking (SDN) has been an eye-catching network architecture. As the essential protocol of SDN, OpenFlow provides the ability to control switches forwarding plane by the remote controller. Currently, OpenFlow protocol is mostly implemented based on TCP. However, due to the limitations of the TCP protocol (e.g., head-of-line blocking), OpenFlow suffers various problems in practical networks, such as performance degradation and increasing network overhead. This paper investigates these issues through experiments and introduces QUIC to handle these issues. Moreover, a scheduling algorithm, called Extended Performance Modular (EPM), is also proposed to further optimize the performance of OpenFlow protocol with QUIC. By considering both message properties and network conditions, EPM effectively utilizes multiple streams of QUIC to avoid head-of-line blocking and improves the efficiency of OpenFlow. The proposed OpenFlow-QUIC with EPM scheme has been implemented and evaluated on both RYU and Open vSwitch (OVS), and the code has been open-sourced. Extensive experiment results show that, compared to traditional OpenFlow, the proposed scheme can reduce applications latency over OpenFlow by 39.3%, while saving 51.6% network overhead on average.