Rule Compilation in Multi-Tenant Networks
Khalil Blaiech, Salaheddine Hamadi, Stefan Hommes, Petko Valtchev, Omar Cherkaoui, Radu State · 2017
Packet forwarding in Software-Defined Networks (SDN) using OpenFlow [5] relies on a centralized network controller to enforce network policies expressed as forwarding rules. Rules are deployed as sets of entries into the tables of network devices. Deploying them onto heterogeneous set of devices is strongly bounded by the respective table constraints (size, lookup time, etc.) and forwarding pipelines. Hence, it is important to minimize the overall number of entries in order to both reduce resource consumption and speed up the search. In this work, we present a compression mechanism for rules of diverging origins that minimizes the number of entries. Since it exploits the semantics of rules and entries, our compiler fits a heterogeneous landscape of network devices. We evaluated implementations of our compiler for both software and hardware switches on a realistic test bed.