Reduction of Table Flow Occupancy and Packet Loss Detection in SDN Switch

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) facilitating network management and monitoring experiences some inevitable problems which affects the performance in terms of delay, on revisiting the limited flow table size problem, a major roadblock to individual flow management of all flows in SDN. We explicitly defined the objective and cost functions that we are interested in, and presented the optimum (i.e., best theoretically possible) solution for flow promotion to achieve it. Then we used the optimum solution as an inspiration to propose a new flow promotion that predicts TCP flow termination (expedited eviction) and incubates non-TCP flows (delayed installation). We provided simulation results that compared our new proposed delayed installation and expedited eviction approach with the default Open Flow approach, the optimum approach, and size-based and rate-based heavy hitter detection using fuzzy model. The results demonstrate that not only our approach provides significant savings in comparison to the default Open Flow approach, it can also perform better than heavy hitter detectors when we use small idle timeouts.