Effects of routing granularity on communication performance in OpenFlow networks

The explosive growth of its usage means that the Internet has to become more flexible in order to handle a huge traffic volume efficiently and a variety of users requirement adaptively. OpenFlow architecture is a promising technology for flexible switching and routing to achieve this. In OpenFlow networks, OpenFlow switches can change their action on the basis of header information of an incoming packet. This allows to control traffic flows on the basis of various routing granularities such as destination IP address, TCP connection, etc. While a fine-grained control can increase routing optimality, its control overhead may decrease the communication performance. In this paper, therefore, the impact of routing granularity on communication performance is investigated through simulation evaluations. The results suggest dynamic changes in the routing granularity be considered for efficient traffic control.