A New Lookup Model for Multiple Flow Tables of Open Flow with Implementation and Optimization Considerations

Open Flow has become the key standard for the southbound interface of software defined networking. The single flow table of Open Flow implementation can lead to fast storage space growth, and finally cause table-overflow, the multiple flow tables can address this problem and provide greater efficiency and flexibility. Through analyzing the potential deployment challenges of Open Flow, this paper proposes a new lookup model with implementation and optimization considerations for multiple flow tables in an Open Flow switch. With the developed lookup model, the original single flow table is split into multiple sub-flow tables, and the fields in each sub-flow table are further divided into several categories according to different field types. Preliminary simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution can effectively reduce the storage space of flow tables.