Programmable and Scalable Per-Flow Traffic Management Scheme Using a Control Server

We propose a programmable and scalable traffic management scheme. Programmable traffic management at high-speed routers is difficult because programmability and high-speed packet processing have involved a serious tradeoff. To attain both, the new scheme combines control programs at a control server and simple packet handling functions, such as sampling packet headers and discarding packets, at routers. Therefore, by installing appropriate control programs into the server, a variety of active queue management schemes, per-flow bandwidth management schemes, DoS mitigation schemes, and so on, are achieved. One of the main contributions of this paper is its proposal of a statistical scheme for handling flows. As only a fraction of complete flow information stored at the control server is loaded into the router's flow table and it is replaced cyclically, the proposed scheme scales more than the router's flow table capacity. Our simulation results indicate that the scheme provides efficient traffic management, per-flow WFQ emulation in our example, even with very small flow tables compared to the number of concurrently active flows. Furthermore, we discuss implementation issues with the proposed scheme and reveal that the processing cost at the server and router is sufficiently small for use with 10 Gbps links.