ConsciousCache: Improving SDN controller scalability using flows similarities

Decoupling Control-Plane from Data-Plane, Software Defined Network (SDN) takes a firm step towards facilitation of management, especially in mission-critical networks, such as data centers and back-bones. To maintain scalability, which is a vital aspect of such networks, many techniques based on the capabilities of hardware and network communications are introduced. However, to cope with scalability issues, less attention is paid to the integrated knowledge gained about underlying network in Control-Plane. To reduce the computing overhead on SDN's controller, a scheme based on extracting similarities among requested flows is presented in this research. Performance evaluation by simulating the proposed method shows significant improvement in scalability of the Controller, while inconsiderable workload is imposed.