A mechanism for reducing flow tables in software defined network

The software defined network (SDN) has been developing tremendously in recent years. Numerous studies are proposed on the performance of SDN in academia. The idea of programmable network which is the foundation of SDN ensures dynamic network management by separating the control plane away from the network switches. The focus of this paper is the flow table´s size in OpenFlow switches which is a significant bottleneck in SDN´s practical application. We propose a mechanism named “Flow Table Reduction Scheme”(FTRS) for reducing the flow table size and maintaining the omnipotent controller´s functions at the same time. We test the performance of FTRS both in simulation and experiment and the results show that FTRS is able to reduce 98% at most of the size of flow table with no impact on network´s normal functions.