Flow Table Scalability in Software-Defined Networking: A Brief Overview
Abinas Panda, Ashok Kumar Turuk, Aliva Panda, Tarinee Prasad Sahoo, Ankit Aryan, Kshira Sagar Sahoo · Apple Academic Press eBooks · 2021
Software-defined networking is a new networking architecture that gives the idea for separation of the control plane (CP) from the data plane (DP) with respect to break the vendor lock-in and simplifies the network management. In order to communicate between the data link layer and controller, a southbound protocol which is popularly known as OpenFlow (OF), which forwards the packets based on flow as compared to traditional destinations based forwarding. With the increase in demand for the number of hosts and devices and ports, it becomes critical to accommodate all flows to provide scalability, as the flow is based on the fine-grain granularity of OF protocol. This chapter provides all the issues related to scalability and its proposed approaches in a software-defined wired network. It discussed 114 the challenges in the flow table and its management. Various solutions and taxonomy or classification in terms of solution approach and problem description such as dynamic flow table or static flow table management are discussed in this chapter. This chapter also provides useful insights and guidelines for designing scalable SDN-based data centers (DCs) for any sort of campus network.