Abstract
SDN deployments rely on switches that come from various vendors and differ in terms of performance and available features. Understanding these differences and performance characteristics is essential for ensuring successful deployments. In this paper we measure, report, and explain the performance characteristics of flow table updates in three hardware OpenFlow switches. Our results can help controller developers to make their programs efficient. Further, we also highlight differences between the OpenFlow specification and its implementations, that if ignored, pose a serious threat to network security and correctness.
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Notes
- 1.
Our benchmark with software OpenVSwitch handles \(\sim \)42000 rule updates/s.
- 2.
Note that we do not need to fully saturate the switch data plane, and thus a conventional host is capable of handling all of these tasks at the same time.
- 3.
The software is going to be optimized and productized in a near future.
- 4.
While experimenting and digging deep to understand the root causes of various behaviors we made other, less critical observations described in a tech report [10].
- 5.
As specified, after receiving a barrier request, the switch has to finish processing all previously-received messages before executing any messages after the barrier request. When the processing is complete, the switch must send a barrier reply message [1].
- 6.
We need to use such a rule to prevent flooding the control channel with the PacketIn messages caused by data plane probes or flooding the probes to all ports.
- 7.
The vendor claims that this limitation occurs only in firmware prior to PicOS 2.2.
- 8.
We observe periods when the switch does not install rules or respond to the controller, but these periods are rare, non reproducible and seem unrelated to the experiments. We think they are caused by periodic background processing at the switch.
References
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Acknowledgments
We thank Marco Canini, Dan Levin and Miguel Peón for helping us get access to the tested switches. We also thank Pica8 and Dell representatives for quick responses and explanations. We thank the reviewers, who provided excellent feedback. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement 259110.
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Kuźniar, M., Perešíni, P., Kostić, D. (2015). What You Need to Know About SDN Flow Tables. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_26
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