PVFlow: Flow-Table Virtualization in POF-based vSDN Hypervisor (PVX)

It is known that by combining network virtualization with software-defined network (SDN), people can realize virtual SDNs (vSDNs) for enhanced programmability, adaptivity and cost-effectiveness. Meanwhile, protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) can overcome the protocol-dependent restriction of Open-Flow and provide a more generic abstraction model of the forwarding elements in SDNs to realize a protocol-independent data plane. In this work, we design a flow-table virtualization module, i.e., PVFlow, to realize resource-efficient flow-table virtualization for POF-based vSDNs. To fully explore the flexibility of POF and support arbitrary matching fields in vSDNs' flow-tables, we propose the idea of “BigMatch”, which enables different flow-tables in vSDNs to share a matching stage in a substrate POF switch efficiently. We implement PVFlow in a POF-based network virtualization hypervisor (NVH) system, i.e., PVX, and verify its effectiveness on improving the efficiency of flow-table virtualization with experiments.