PARD: Hybrid Proactive and Reactive Method Eliminating Flow Setup Latency in SDN

Abstract

Advantages of Software Defined Networking are unquestionable and are widely described in numerous scientific papers, business white papers and press articles. However, to achieve full maturity, crucial impediments to this concept and its shortcomings must be overcame. One of the most important issues regards significant setup latency of a new flow. To address this issue we propose PARD: a hybrid proactive and reactive method to manage flow table entries. Additional advantages of the proposed solution are, among the others, its ability to preserve all capabilities of Software Defined Networking, utilization of multiple flow tables, a possibility to employ fine-grained traffic engineering and, finally, compatibility with existing protocol and hardware design. It is shown that the proposed solution is able to significantly reduce latency of first packets of a new flow, which directly impacts packet loss and perceived throughput. Thus, our solution is expected to enable a wide deployment of Software Defined Networking concept without any need for protocol changes or, what is extremely important, hardware modifications.