An optimized flow management mechanism in OpenFlow network

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides an abstraction of the network that allows network administrators to configure network devices seamlessly across the enterprise networks. Although SDN has created a new paradigm in next generation network, centralized controller architecture in SDN imposes overhead issue because control plane will handle all flows regardless of size and priority. Besides that, default OpenFlow pull-based statistics gathering mechanism causes interference with flow entries and consume bandwidth. Moreover, existing frameworks do not focus on managing security-sensitive flows. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed to optimize the workload of controller. The controller manages elephant flows and security-sensitive flows via reactive routing and access control rule placement. Unlike traditional mechanism in SDN, the data plane switches are programmed to forward microflows via multipath wildcard routing without invoking controller.