A High-Performance IO Engine for SDN Controllers

In software defined networking (SDN), a controller acts as the "brain," providing a centralized view of the whole network. Through the controller, the network can be quickly and easily programmed and managed. Consequently, the importance of an SDN controller\´s performance is significant. In SDN controllers, high performance has two aspects: fast response time, and high flow-setup rate. In this paper, we present a high-performance IO engine that gives at least a 26% higher flow-setup rate than current state-of-the-art controllers while maintaining the fastest response time. The IRIS IO engine adopts a multi-queue design, which is fundamentally different from the other controllers\´ approaches. Further, our evaluation results show that the IRIS IO engine has the best processing-core scalability among the fastest open-source controllers.