An adaptive scheme for data forwarding in software defined network

Software Defined Network (SDN) is undergoing an increasingly high popularity among various schemes of networking deployment. The main advantage of SDN lies in its flexibility in controlling network traffic, which arises from decoupling the control plane and the data plane of network devices. However, despite of the valuable merits of SDN, the outage of data forwarding should not be ignored. The drawback mainly results from the length limitation of switch flow tables, the congestion between controllers and switches, and the deficiency of the controller capacity, which are all closely related to the timeout mechanism of flow table. In our study, the deficiency of SDN system will be analyzed explicitly. Moreover, we propose an adaptive control mechanism aiming at optimizing the idle timeout reset of flow tables and cooperation between controllers and switches. Our mechanism achieves higher matching ratio of flow tables as well as alleviates the congestion in the control channel, enabling more fluent data forwarding in SDN.