Minnie : An SDN world with few compressed forwarding rules

International audienceSoftware Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining momentum with the support of major manufacturers. While it brings flexibility to the management of flows within the data center fabric, this flexibility comes at the cost of smaller routing table capacities. Indeed, the Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) needed by SDN devices has smaller capacities than CAMs used in legacy hardware. In this paper, we investigate compression techniques to maximize the utility of SDN switches forwarding tables. We validate our algorithm, called MINNIE, with intensive simulations for well-known data center topologies, to study its efficiency and compression ratio for a large number of forwarding rules. Our results indicate that MINNIE scales well, being able to deal with around a million of different flows with less than 1000 forwarding entries per SDN switch, requiring negligible computation time. To assess the operational viability of MINNIE in real networks, we deployed a testbed able to emulate a k = 4 Fat-Tree data center topology. We demonstrate on the one hand, that even with a small number of clients, the limit in terms of number of rules is reached if no compression is performed, increasing the delay of new incoming flows. MINNIE, on the other hand, reduces drastically the number of rules that need to be stored, with no packet losses, nor detectable extra delays if routing lookups are done in the Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Hence, both simulations and experimental results suggest that MINNIE can be safely deployed in real networks, providing compression ratios between 70% and 99%