Sector: TCAM Space Aware Routing on SDN

In Software Defined Networking (SDN), fine-grained control over individual flow can be achieved by installing appropriate forwarding rules in switches and routers. This allows the network to realize a wide variety of functionalities and objectives. But at the same time, this flexibility and versatility come at the expense of (1) a huge burden on the limited Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) space, and (2) limited scalability due to the large number of forwarding rules handled by the controller. To address these limitations, we present Sector, a switch memory-aware routing scheme that reduces TCAM space usage without introducing network congestion. We consider static and dynamic versions and propose corresponding solution algorithms. Experiments show our algorithms can reduce TCAM space usage and network control traffic by 20%-80% compared with the benchmark algorithms on different network topologies.