Title :
Packet-In Message Control for Reducing CPU Load and Control Traffic in OpenFlow Switches
Author :
Kotani, Daisuke ; Okabe, Yasuo
Author_Institution :
Grad. Sch. of Inf., Kyoto Univ., Kyoto, Japan
Abstract :
We propose a method to control Packet-In messages in OpenFlow switches for reducing CPU and network utilization of switches and controllers. In OpenFlow network, controllers setup flow entries to switches in response to Packet-In messages from switches. When a host suddenly starts to send many packets of a flow without any negotiation in advance, like a video stream on UDP, the control traffic and CPU utilization of switches and controllers become high until the flow entries are inserted into switches, and this high utilization would make network control unstable. In this paper, we propose a method to filter out unimportant Packet-In messages to reduce CPU utilization and the control traffic in OpenFlow switches and controllers. We categorize Packet-In messages into three groups, State Change, Flow Setup and Forward. Controllers process these messages to change the internal state of controllers, to trigger inserting flow entries, and to forward packets to other switches, respectively. Forward type of messages are less important than State Change and Flow Setup messages in terms of network control, because State Change and Flow Setup messages change states of network such as flow entries but Forward messages do not. We propose a method to identify Forward messages in switches by recording the header of Flow Setup packets and by matching packets with recorded flows. We have implemented our method into Open vSwitch to limit the bandwidth of Forward type of messages, and our evaluation shows that our method can control Packet-In messages with little CPU utilization overhead in the switch.
Keywords :
packet switching; software radio; telecommunication control; telecommunication network management; telecommunication traffic; traffic control; CPU load; Open vSwitch; OpenFlow switches; UDP; control traffic; flow setup messages; flow setup packets; forward messages 4; network controllers utilization; network switches utilization; packet-in message control; state change; traffic control; video stream; Bandwidth; Control systems; Delay; Generators; Process control; Quality of service; Software; OpenFlow; Packet Transmission; Rate Limit;
Conference_Titel :
Software Defined Networking (EWSDN), 2012 European Workshop on
Conference_Location :
Darmstadt
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-4554-5
DOI :
10.1109/EWSDN.2012.23