OpenFlow Controller-Switch Communication Overhead Reduction Scheme on Industrial Data Center Networks

This paper proposes a framework to reduce overhead of controller-switch communication for industrial SDN-based Data Center Networks (DCN). The proposal focuses on OpenFlow (OF) to reduce the number of control messages, consisting of both PACKET_IN and PACKET_OUT messages handled by the OF controller during rule installation on OF switches' flow tables and to selectively choose switches for rule installation. Extensive simulation shows significant results on reduced controller workload. The performance provides a mutual trade-off by considerably improving rule matching rate in the presence of slightly enhanced number of flow entries, conserving resources on both OF controller and OF switches for SDN-based DCN operation. As a consequence, network latency is reduced while throughput is enhanced, which offers a great promise in the future deployment of industrial DCN.