RuleTris: Minimizing Rule Update Latency for TCAM-Based SDN Switches

Software-defined network (SDN) is deemed to enable more dynamic management of data center networks that promptly respond to network events with changes in network policies. Although the SDN controller architecture is increasingly optimized for swift policy updates, the data plane, especially the prevailing TCAM-based flow tables on physical SDN switches, remains unoptimized for fast rule updates, and is gradually becoming the primary bottleneck along the policy update pipeline. In this paper, we present RuleTris, the first SDN update optimization framework that minimizes rule update latency for TCAM-based switches. RuleTris employs the dependency graph (DAG) as the key abstraction to minimize the update latency. RuleTris efficiently obtains the DAGs with novel dependency preserving algorithms that incrementally build rule dependency along with the compilation process. Then, in the guidance of the DAG, RuleTris optimizes the rule updates in TCAM to avoid unnecessary entry moves, which are the main cause of TCAM update inefficiency. We prove that RuleTris generates TCAM updates with the minimum number of TCAM entry moves. In evaluation, RuleTris achieves a median of