The Demonstration of Hyper Software Defined Hardware Counters

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides efficient network and traffic management for data center network. As underlying devices in SDN, SDN switches must maintain a large number of hardware counters. Implementation of these counters faces serious challenges for SDN switches, i.e., High memory consumption and inflexibility. Thus, we previously proposed Software Defined Hardware Counters (SDHC), which decouples definition and implementation of counters to overcome these challenges. However, like traditional hardware counters, SDHC only supports passive statistical mode (i.e., The values of the counters can be only read passively by the controller). Based on the passive mode, most of applications need to send request messages at some frequency to obtain statistics, which causes some critical problems for SDN: i) low statistical accuracy, ii) high network bandwidth consumption. Hyper Software Defined Hardware Counters (Hyper SDHC) is thus proposed by extending SDHC. Through introducing the timer-triggering and updating-triggering statistics-reporting mechanisms, Hyper SDHC can naturally support active statistical mode, i.e., Counters actively report their values according to triggering condition. It can greatly enhance the statistical accuracy and reduce network bandwidth consumption between controller and switch. The demo of Hyper SDHC is implemented based on Net Magic platform. The demo will exhibit how Hyper SDHC works and how it supports a typical video quality monitor application.