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OFLOPS-SUME and the art of switch characterization

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. The philosophy of software-defined networking (SDN) has introduced new challenges in network system management. In contrast to traditional network devices that contained both the control and the data plane functionality in a tightly coupled manner, SDN technologies separate the two network planes and define a remote API for low-level device configuration. Nonetheless, the enhanced flexibility of the SDN paradigm is prone to create novel performance and scalability bottlenecks in the network. To help network managers and application developers better understand the actual behavior of SDN implementations, we present a hardware/software co-design that enables switch characterization at 40 Gbps and beyond. We conduct an evaluation of both software and hardware switches. We expose the unwanted effects of the OpenFlow barrier primitive, potential misbehaviors when adding or modifying a batch of rules, and how simple operations, such as packet modification, can impact the switch forwarding performance. We release the code publicly as open source to promote experiments reproducibility as well as encourage the network community to evolve our solution.

Description

Keywords

OpenFlow, testing, switch performances

Journal Title

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0733-8716
1558-0008

Volume Title

36

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P025374/1)
This work was supported by the U.K.’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the EARL and TOUCAN projects under Grants EP/P025374/1 and EP/L02009/1.