SDN-Based Switch Implementation on Network Processors

Abstract

Virtualization is the key technology of cloud computing. Network virtualization plays an important role in this field. Its performance is very relevant to network virtualizing. Nowadays its implementations are mainly based on the idea of Software Define Network (SDN). Open vSwitch is a sort of software virtual switch, which conforms to the OpenFlow protocol standard. It is basically deployed in the Linux kernel hypervisor. This leads to its performance relatively poor because of the limited system resource. In turn, the packet process throughput is very low.In this paper, we present a Cavium-based Open vSwitch implementation. The Cavium platform features with multi cores and couples of hard ac-celerators. It supports zero-copy of packets and handles packet more quickly. We also carry some experiments on the platform. It indicates that we can use it in the enterprise network or campus network as convergence layer and core layer device.