Multi-dimensional Hashing for Fast Network Information Processing in SDN

To realize the potential benefits of SDN, tremendous amount of network information has to be collected, stored, processed and retrieved for the central routing and resource allocation optimization in near real-time. However, the current SDN-Open Flow controller and management applications did not address this issue properly and could not easily and efficiently retrieve and utilize the available analytics on-time. Their "network information bases" are rudimentary, and could not facilitate the required fast processing and accessing for required intelligent information for large networks. We present an innovative mechanism that architects such information into a multi-dimensional model, utilizing prevailing technologies in large scale real-time data processing, the advances in in-memory SQL and NoSQL and the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Data and their hidden characteristics and inter-relationships can then be stored in-memory or cached using key/values as in NoSQL, while more static information could be persisted into local file system or SQL database, and globally in a centralized SQL database (or a data warehouse) that can store large amounts of historical data that can be easily processed with OLAP or data mining for intelligence. Extensive experiments and comparison with traditional relational database or in-memory hashing table clearly demonstrated the feasibility, capability and performance advantage of the proposed approach.