DevoFlow

Andrew R. Curtis, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Jean Tourrilhes, Praveen Yalagandula, Puneet Sharma, Sujata Banerjee
2011 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference on SIGCOMM - SIGCOMM '11  
OpenFlow is a great concept, but its original design imposes excessive overheads. It can simplify network and traffic management in enterprise and data center environments, because it enables flow-level control over Ethernet switching and provides global visibility of the flows in the network. However, such fine-grained control and visibility comes with costs: the switch-implementation costs of involving the switch's control-plane too often and the distributed-system costs of involving the
more » ... low controller too frequently, both on flow setups and especially for statistics-gathering. In this paper, we analyze these overheads, and show that OpenFlow's current design cannot meet the needs of highperformance networks. We design and evaluate DevoFlow, a modification of the OpenFlow model which gently breaks the coupling between control and global visibility, in a way that maintains a useful amount of visibility without imposing unnecessary costs. We evaluate DevoFlow through simulations, and find that it can load-balance data center traffic as well as fine-grained solutions, without as much overhead: DevoFlow uses 10-53 times fewer flow table entries at an average switch, and uses 10-42 times fewer control messages.
doi:10.1145/2018436.2018466 dblp:conf/sigcomm/CurtisMTYSB11 fatcat:wpoefgm7prcpnbz64mazf3efry