High-Efficiency Matching Mechanism for Off-Chip Tables in OpenFlow-enabled Legacy Switch

Abstract

Commercial OpenFlow-enabled legacy switches implement flow tables with Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) to perform high-speed flow matching process. However, the size of TCAM-based flow table is restricted to few thousands of entries due to manufacturing cost and high power consumption. In our previous research, we proposed Flow Entry Agent to integrate Off-Chip tables to increase the storage capacity without modifying Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). In this paper, we propose an efficient matching mechanism for Off-Chip tables. Simulation results show that our mechanism significantly increase the efficiency of flow matching process.