Mitigating SDN Flow Table Overflow

The flow table in OpenFlow switches plays a critical role in OpenFlow-based Software Defined Networking (SDN), which stores the rules populated by the controllers for controlling and directing the packet flows in SDN. The limited capacity of flow table becomes a performance bottleneck of SDN and new target for malicious attacks, as well. This paper analyzes the timeout impact on the flow table performance and proposes the Dynamic LRU flow entry rule eviction algorithm to mitigate the SDN flow table overflow and improve the SDN performance.