Dynamic Hard Timeout based Flow Table Management in Openflow enabled SDN

Abstract

Software Defined Networking is the innovation in the network which allows us to manage the network dynamically in an efficient way. Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is being used by the OpenFlow switches because it is faster look-up. However, it is very costly, and also the number of flow entries accommodated in it is less due to its limited size. So to take full advantage of the TCAM, we need to maximize the flow table utilization. To improve the TCAM allocation, This paper emphasizes managing the Hard Timeout of the flow table entries. We are proposing a Dynamic way to allocate the flow entry timeout so that the flow table can be used optimally by assigning different dynamic timeout considering predictable and unpredictable flows. The results show that Dynamically allotted hard timeout along with LRU as the eviction method performs better than the Statically allotted hard timeout along with LRU.