SDN Flow Entry Adaptive Timeout Mechanism based on Resource Preference

Software-defined networking brings rich and more efficient means to network control management. However, the fixed timeout mechanism of flow entry causes the waste of flow table resources and controller computing resources. This paper proposes an SDN flow entry adaptive timeout mechanism. The mechanism allocates a suitable timeout for different flows based on the characteristics of the data flow, and dynamically adjusts idle timeout value to prevent the flow table from overflowing. The experimental results show that the proposed adaptive timeout mechanism can make full use of flow table resources and controller computing resources to achieve higher average network throughput.