The FlowAdapter
Heng Pan, Hongtao Guan, Junjie Liu, Wanfu Ding, Chengyong Lin, Gaogang Xie · 2013
OpenFlow is one of the most potential technique to enable innovation in network. To enable OpenFlow more flexibility and high-efficiency, multi-table pipeline has been introduced in OpenFlow. A HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer) is proposed to address the incompatibility of flow table pipeline between legacy switch hardware and the controller. However, the burden of controller will be increased greatly. In this paper, an innovative middle layer called FlowAdapter is proposed. It converts flow entry rules from the controller flow table pipeline to switch hardware flow table pipeline, so that the same rules can be fitted into different types of hardware. With FlowAdapter, legacy OpenFlow hardware can be used to support multi-table pipeline rules. Located in switch, FlowAdapter is transparent to the controller. With a prototype implementation, we find that the FlowAdapter performs rules conversion effectively.