A storage approach for OpenFlow switch based on Protocol Oblivious Forwarding

OpenFlow, which facilitates decoupling between the forwarding and control plane, is developing rapidly and has already been widely studied in various fields. OpenFlow switches perform certain actions under the guidance of flow tables, which are configured by the controller. Currently, most of the work based on OpenFlow switch is concerned with switching performance such as forwarding rate, forwarding latency and flow table efficiency. In contrast, little work has been done on storage for OpenFlow switches. However, directly imposing storage functionality on OpenFlow switches with large capacity storage devices will lead to a series of problems. The most protruding and apparent one is the degradation of forwarding rate, which is one of the most important figure of merits for OpenFlow switch. This paper analyses the typical problems in this context and proposes a novel storage approach based on Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF), which is an enhancement to OpenFlow-based SDN forwarding architecture. The preliminary experimental results on Linux-based POF soft switch validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.