Measurement-Driven Flow Selection for Open vSwitch Offload

Open vSwitch has become increasingly popular in the network virtualization world due to its flexible, flow-based forwarding scheme. However, this flexibility comes at a performance cost. To mitigate the cost, in recent years, organizations have begun to download flow-table entries to a hardware cache to improve throughput. This mechanism is known as OVS Offload. In this paper, we introduce MEG, a new algorithm to select flow candidates for offload that minimizes the offload cost while maintaining a high hardware cache hit ratio. MEG builds on a measurement study of traffic handled by Internet core routers. Experimental results reveal that MEG outperforms other offload algorithms and traditional OVS.