Design and Implementation of a Packet-in Buffer System for SDN Switches

Abstract

In this paper, we designed, implemented, and evaluated the performance of a Packet-in packet buffer system in an SDN bare metal commodity switch and Open vSwitch. In our approach, only the first packet of a new flow needs to be sent to the SDN controller via a Packet-in packet and all subsequent packets can be temporarily stored in the Packet-in packet buffer system until the arrival of the flow rule. Our experimental results show that our approach effectively prevents packets of a new flow from being dropped when they pass an SDN switch, significantly reduces the switch CPU usage, greatly reduces the control plane bandwidth usage, and greatly reduces the Packet-in packet processing load imposed on the SDN controller.