Open AccessMixedCache: Enabling Flow Directed Rule-Caching Scheme based on Heterogeneous Cache for OpenFlow
Author(s) -
Jialun Yang,
Yi Yang,
Jiahao Liu,
Rulin Liu,
Qiao Peng,
Baosheng Wang
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/1693/1/012044
Subject(s) - cache , computer science , openflow , static random access memory , scheme (mathematics) , computer network , universal memory , cpu cache , computer hardware , memory management , embedded system , distributed computing , software defined networking , semiconductor memory , interleaved memory , mathematical analysis , mathematics
OpenFlow switches in SDN use Multiple Flow Tables (MFTs) for fine-grained flow control. Commodity switches integrate hardware storage resources such as SRAM and TCAM to store flow tables to achieve high-speed lookups. Many increased flow tables are rapidly exhausting these hardware storage resources, which makes the switches have to balance high-speed search and massive storage. The rule-caching scheme is a popular method to solve this problem, which caches the most commonly used rules into hardware storage resources. The existing rule-caching schemes are based on single hardware storage resources, and they cannot flexibly adjust the caching strategy according to the traffic characteristics. Simultaneously, the deployed commodity switches face the problem of difficulty in changing the size of SRAM and TCAM. This paper innovatively proposes the MixedCache scheme, which makes full use of the hardware storage resources in the switch according to the skewed characteristics of network traffic. MixedCache stores the large flows in SRAM by exact match and stores the small flows in the TCAM by wildcard match. MixedCache does not need to change the size of the deployed switch hardware storage resources, but makes full use of existing resources. Compared with the rule-caching scheme based on the exact match, the cache hit rate can increase by up to 15.61%. Compared with the rule-caching scheme based on the wildcard match, the cache hit rate can increase by up to 29.69%.