Wildcard-rule caching and cache replacement algorithms in Software-Defined Networking

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) capacity problem is an important issue in Software-Defined Networking. Rule caching is an efficient technique to solve the TCAM capacity problem. However, there exists rule dependency problem in wildcard-rule caching technique. In this paper, we utilize cover-set method to solve the rule dependency problem and propose a wildcard-rule caching algorithm to cache rules into TCAM. In addition, we also propose a cache replacement algorithm considering both temporal and spatial localities. According to the simulation results, our wildcard-rule caching algorithm and cache replacement algorithm have better performance than previous works in terms of caching ratio and hit ratio, respectively.