An intelligent method for reducing the overhead of analysing big data flows in Openflow switch

Abstract

Software-defined networks have been developed to allow the entire network to be managed as a programmable entity. As a well-known protocol in this field, OpenFlow installs new packet forwarding rules of the distinct packets of Big Data flows (known as flow entries) in the flow tables of network switches in order to implement the desired management policies. Despite the high speed, flow tables have limited capacity to store the information of Big Data flows. As a result of inefficient policy for replacing the entries of the flow table, lack of flow entries corresponding to the incoming packets in the flow table of the switch will increase the references to the controller for forwarding this packet as well as the amount of delay in packet forwarding. The underlying idea of the proposed method is to make use of the popularity of traffic flows in the table to select the intended flow for the replacement. For replacement of flow table entries, a novel and intelligent method is proposed in this research which uses a reference history of flows to assign an importance degree to each table entry. Comparison of the simulation results confirms the superiority of the method for reducing the controller's overflow.