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Rethinking the Design of OpenFlow Switch Counters

Published: 22 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

OpenFlow, as the Software Defined Networking (SDN) primitive, provides a simple forwarding plane abstraction, which heavily relies on the fast memory inside the OpenFlow Switch (OFS). OFS components, e.g. flow table, meter table, counters, have to compete for the limited fast memory resource. As a result, only a few counting functions are defined as mandatory in the OFS specification, although a lot of SDN proposals depend on a detailed states collected by the optional counters in the specification. This fact motivates us to rethink the way to maintain counters in the OFS. We propose a new architecture called CACTI, which only consumes several registers in the fast path and moves the completed counters into the on chip RAM like cache in the slow path processor. Theoretical analysis and experiments on the prototype system demonstrated the efficiency of our architecture: CACTI is capable to achieve the throughput of 29.4-39.7M pps packets per second (pps). No RAM resource is needed any more in the fast path, instead, CACTI consumes only 0.24-0.54\% Look-Up Table and 0.35-0.43\% flip-flops compared with the entire FPGA-based OFS design in the fast path, and the unused CPU cache in the slow path.

References

[1]
P. Bosshart, G. Gibb, H.-S. Kim, G. Varghese, N. McKeown, M. Izzard, F. Mujica, and M. Horowitz. Forwarding metamorphosis: Fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN. In ACM SIGCOMM CCR, 2013.
[2]
G. Einziger, B. Fellman, and Y. Kassner. Independent counter estimation buckets. In IEEE INFOCOM, 2015.
[3]
C. Hu, B. Liu, H. Zhao, K. Chen, Y. Chen, C. Wu, and Y. Cheng. DISCO: Memory efficient and accurate flow statistics for network measurement. In IEEE ICDCS, 2010.
[4]
C. Hu, J. Yang, H. Zhao, and J. Lu. Design of all programmable innovation platform for software defined networking. In Open Networking Summit, 2014.
[5]
ONF. OpenFlow Switch Specification Ver 1.5.1, 2015.

Cited By

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  • (2023)Understanding Issues and Challenges of DFR Implementation in SDN PlatformProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2023.01.292219(286-293)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)Concise Retrieval of Flow Statistics for Software-Defined NetworksIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2021.306530616:1(554-565)Online publication date: Mar-2022
  • (2021)Security and Performance Evaluation of Software Defined Network Controllers Against Distributed Denial of Service Attack2021 Fourth International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies (ICECCT)10.1109/ICECCT52121.2021.9616684(1-8)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference
    August 2016
    645 pages
    ISBN:9781450341936
    DOI:10.1145/2934872
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 22 August 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. OpenFlow
    2. SDN counter

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    SIGCOMM '16
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    SIGCOMM '16: ACM SIGCOMM 2016 Conference
    August 22 - 26, 2016
    Florianopolis, Brazil

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    SIGCOMM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 231 submissions, 17%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Understanding Issues and Challenges of DFR Implementation in SDN PlatformProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2023.01.292219(286-293)Online publication date: 2023
    • (2022)Concise Retrieval of Flow Statistics for Software-Defined NetworksIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2021.306530616:1(554-565)Online publication date: Mar-2022
    • (2021)Security and Performance Evaluation of Software Defined Network Controllers Against Distributed Denial of Service Attack2021 Fourth International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies (ICECCT)10.1109/ICECCT52121.2021.9616684(1-8)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
    • (2019)Fault Management in Software-Defined Networking: A SurveyIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.286892221:1(349-392)Online publication date: Sep-2020

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