A novel pflua-based OpenFlow implementation for VOSYSwitch

Software Defined Network (SDN) along with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigms are emerging as a viable alternative to traditional network architecture. The Fog and Mobile Edge computing network and the Internet of Things infrastructure are adopting these concepts as well. In this context, virtual and SDN-enabled switches are crucial. This paper presents the novel OpenFlow software implementation of VOSYSwitch, the high performance virtual switch solution developed by Virtual Open Systems. Written in Lua, such OpenFlow implementation takes advantage of the library pflua and of the LuaJIT just-in-time trace compiler to translate OpenFlow flows into Lua code via the PCAP Filter language. As a consequence, the code executed to perform the flow matching and actions is generated on demand and tailored to the flow entries of the forwarding tables of the dataplane. Benchmarking activities, whose results are included in this paper, have been performed to compare this new OpenFlow switch implementation with the de-facto standard OpenFlow switch solution OVS-DPDK. The results show that VOSYSwitch OpenFlow implementation is superior to OVS-DPDK for environments with simple flow configurations and low number of entries, typical of Edge Computing.