TCAM table resource allocation for virtual openflow switch

In a recent effort to push forward the powerful concept of software defined networks, Openflow has gained a lot of popularity as a practical approach to split the data and the control planes by standardizing an open interface that allow remote software controllers to dictate the forwarding behavior of network devices. This paper presents a TCAM resource allocation mechanism for the implementation of virtual Openflow v1.1 switch. This mechanism, based on optimization, aims to allocate the slice tables over the TCAM resources while minimizing the TCAM energy-consumption and maximizing the fairness between the slices. We formulate the problem as an integer non linear programming and show that his complexity is NP-complete. We solve it using Genetic algorithm and Tabu search. We compare our proposed algorithms and show that they provide near optimal solutions in short time. Our multi-objective problem offer the flexibility to the user to whether give preference to the lowest table allocation energy or the highest fairness between the slices.