DART: Data Plane Load Reduction for Traffic Flow Migration in SDN
Ilora Maity, Sudip Misra, Chittaranjan Mandal
Abstract
In this paper, we present a traffic-aware flow migration approach, which reduces data plane load in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) during a network update. SDN update involves rerouting of multiple traffic flows to accommodate new flows. An unplanned flow migration schedule overloads the data plane by burdening the data links and flooding the rule-space of capacity-constrained SDN switches. The overload of data links and switches blocks the update process, and the network fails to address the Quality of Service (QoS) demands of the traffic flows, especially latency-sensitive flows. Prior approaches migrate flows without considering load reduction of the data plane along with QoS demands of the flows. In this work, we propose a load reduction strategy that prioritizes traffic flows based on QoS demands and aims to avoid link congestion and rule-space overflow during flow migration. The proposed scheme significantly reduces the maximum data link bandwidth usage. In particular, the maximum data link bandwidth usage is 13.22% less than the two-phase update approach.