Too many SDN rules? Compress them with MINNIE

Myriana Rifai (1) , Nicolas Huin (2) , Christelle Caillouet (2) , Frédéric Giroire (2) , Dino Lopez Pacheco (1) , Joanna Moulierac (2) , Guillaume Urvoy-Keller (1)

1 Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis (I3S) / Equipe SIGNET
2 COATI - Combinatorics, Optimization and Algorithms for Telecommunications

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining momentum with the support of major manufacturers. While it brings flexibility in the management of flows within the data center fabric, this flexibility comes at the cost of smaller routing table capacities. In this paper, we investigate compression techniques to reduce the forwarding information base (FIB) of SDN switches. We validate our algorithm, called MINNIE, on a real testbed able to emulate a 20 switches fat tree architecture. We demonstrate that even with a small number of clients, the limit in terms of number of rules is reached if no compression is performed, increasing the delay of all new incoming flows. MINNIE, on the other hand, reduces drastically the number of rules that need to be stored with a limited impact on the packet loss rate. We also evaluate the actual switching and reconfiguration times and the delay introduced by the communications with the controller.

Mots clés: Software defined networks; experimentation; TCAM; number of rules

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Myriana Rifai, Nicolas Huin, Christelle Caillouet, Frédéric Giroire, Dino Lopez Pacheco, et al.. Too many SDN rules? Compress them with MINNIE. IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE, Dec 2015, San diego, United States. ⟨hal-01203020⟩