A Trie-Based Approach to Fast and Scalable Flow Recognition for OpenFlow

Software Defined Networking (SDN), as an emerging Internet architecture, improves the scalability and programmability of the network by decoupling the control plane and the forwarding plane effectively. In the data plane, OpenFlow switch, that consists of a flow table and a set of actions associated with flow entries, works as the infrastructure. To deploy SDN for large-scale networks, improving the performance of flow recognition in OpenFlow switch is a challenge. This paper presents a trie-based approach to achieve efficient wildcard-aware search for flow recognition with reasonable cost of both memory and update. Depending on the experimental evaluation, the throughput of our approach is almost 48 times higher than the conventional approach. Meanwhile, our memory cost has been reduced by 500 MB, and the update speed is also improved by 7.5 KPPS.