Flow-split: An approach to reduce flow establish time and invoking of controller in OpenFlow networks
Yi Tao, Hanyu Li · 2016 IEEE Information Technology, Networking, Electronic and Automation Control Conference · 2016
In OpenFlow networks, the controller configures the forwarding of packets and gets states and statistics of the network from operating on flow entries in flow tables of switches. This centralized controlling brings such a problem. If flow entries matching a wide range of packets is installed, the controller cannot get statistics of precise flows. If flow entries to match a precise range are used, lots of misses are happened, which invokes the controller frequently and affects the performance of packet forwarding. In this paper, we propose and implement a new OpenFlow action: flow-split to solve this problem. This action can generate new flow entries in the switch according to its configurations and the header fields of the matched packets. By installing flows using flow-split action that match a wide range, the controller can still get the statistics of more precise flows from the generated precise flow entries, and reduce the invoking of the controller. Experiments on emulated networks shows that flow entries with flow-split action achieves a significant reduction on flow establish time and involvement of the controller.