Rules placement with delay guarantee in combined SDN forwarding element

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the flow table size of hardware SDN switch cannot match the number of concurrent flows. Combined SDN Forwarding Element (CFE), which comprises several software switches and a hardware switch, becomes an alternative approach to tackle this problem. Due to the limited capacity of software switch, the way to route concurrent flows in CFE can largely affect the maximum delay that a flow suffers at CFE. As delay-guarantee is a nontrivial task for network providers with the increasing number of delay-sensitive applications, we propose an analytical model of CFE to evaluate a rules placement solution first. Next, we formulate the problem of Rules Placement with delay guarantee in CFE (RPCFE), and present the genetic-based rules placement (GARP) algorithm to solve the RPCFE problem. Further, we validate the analytical model of CFE through simulations in NS-3 and compare the performance of GARP with three benchmark algorithms.