Intelligent timeout master: Dynamic timeout for SDN-based data centers

Software Defined Networks (SDN) such as OpenFlow provides better network management for data center by decoupling control plane from data plane. Current OpenFlow controllers install flow rules with a fixed timeout after which the switch automatically removes the rules from its flow table. However, this fixed timeout has shown many disadvantages. For flows with short packet interval, the timeout may be too large so that flow rules stay in the flow table for too long time and result in unnecessary occupation of flow table; for flows with long packet interval or periodic flows, the timeout may be too short, hence producing too many packet-in events and causing overload on the controller. In this paper, we propose the Intelligent Timeout Master, which can assign suitable timeout to different flows according to their characteristics, as well as conduct a feedback control to adjust the max timeout value according to the current flow table occupation, in an effort to avoid flow table overflow. In our experiments, we use real traffic trace and the result confirms that our Intelligent Timeout Master performs quite well in reducing the number of packet-in events as well as flow table occupation.