A flow entry management scheme for reducing controller overhead

Abstract

In this paper, we advocate addressing the communication overhead problem between OpenFlow controllers and OpenFlow switches due to table-miss in a flow table. It may cause the communication overhead between controllers and switches because a switch has to send packet-in message to a controller for processing table-missed flows. We propose a simple flow entry management scheme for reducing the controller overhead by increasing the flow entry matching ratio. By using an LRU caching algorithm, a switch can keep the flow entries in a flow table as many as possible, and then the flow entry matching ratio can be increased.