Scalable and fair forwarding of elephant and mice traffic in software defined networks

Abstract

A software defined network decouples the control and data planes of the networking devices and places the control plane of all the switches in a central server. These flow based networks do not scale well because of the increased number of switch to controller communications, limited size of flow tables and increased size of flow table entries in the switches. In our work we use labels to convey control information of path and policy in the packet. This makes the core of the network simple and all routing and policy decisions are taken at the edge. The routing algorithm splits the elephant traffic into mice and distributes them across multiple paths, thus ensuring latency sensitive mice traffic is not adversely affected by elephant traffic. We observed that label based forwarding and traffic splitting work well together to enable scalable and fair forwarding. Our approach is topology independent. We present here a few preliminary simulation results obtained by running our routing algorithm on random network topologies. 2015 Elsevier B.V.