应用于协议无感知转发交换机的流缓存方法

Flow Caching in Protocol Oblivious Forwarding Switches

协议无感知转发支持任意协议的解析和处理,增强了软件定义网络的可编程能力。为提高转发性能,该文提出一种应用于协议无感知转发交换机的流缓存方法,通过识别匹配和动作的依赖关系,得到匹配字段的绝对位置,用以预先解析报文。为确保流缓存的加速效果,根据匹配类型与表项数量选择应用流缓存的流表。此外,该文对比了单流表缓存与多流表缓存对转发性能的提升,并提出了根据网络流量实际情况的自适应切换策略。通过扩展POFSwitch实现所提方法,并用实际规则与骨干网流量进行验证,应用流缓存后,交换机报文转发速率提升了220%。流缓存可以为可编程数据平面提供更高的转发性能。

Protocol Oblivious Forwarding （POF） supports the arbitrary protocol processing, enhancing the programmability of Software Defined Networking （SDN）. In order to improve the forwarding performance, a flow caching method is proposed. To parse the packet in advance, absolute positions of matching fields are obtained by identifying the dependency of matching and actions. To guarantee the acceleration effect of flow caching, flow tables are selected according to their matching types and number of entries. In addition, the single-flow table cache and multi-flow table cache are compared and an adaptive switching strategy is proposed based on the actual situation of network traffic. The POFSwitch is extended to implement the proposed method and it is validated under the real rules and backbone traces. The switch packet forwarding rate is increased by 220% after applying flow caching. Flow caching can provide higher forwarding performance for programmable data planes.