CheetahFlow: Towards low latency software-defined network

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN), which enables programmability, has the advantage of global visibility and high flexibility. However, when forwarding new flows in SDN, the interaction between the switch and the controller imposes extra latency such as round-trip time and routing path search time. Even though such latency is acceptable for elephant flows since it only takes limited ratio of total transmission time of elephant flows, it is an overkill to pay certain overheads for mice flows due to the their short transmission time. Moreover, the controller is frequently invoked by the mice flows since the number of mice flows accounts for a large portion of the total number of flows. Hence, the frequent controller invocation is mainly responsible for the controller performance degradation, and thus increasing the flow setup latency significantly. To solve this problem, we propose CheetahFlow, a novel scheme to predict frequent communication pairs via support vector machine and proactively setup wildcard rules to reduce flow setup latency. Particularly, in order to avoid congestion along a fixed path, elephant flows are detected and rerouted to the non-congestion path efficiently by applying blocking island paradigm. Extensive experiments show that CheetahFlow prominently reduces latency without any loss of flexibility of SDN.

SDN-Enabled Communication Network Framework for Energy Internet

“…The reason is that the switch does not know how to forward packets by optimal routing path for the first time, until the controller discovers the links among switches and sends flow tables to the switches along the routing path, which introduces extra latency in this discovery and delivery process. Our results also coincide with the measurements in [27,29]. Meanwhile, the latency of packets with the traditional network framework is a little bit higher than that with the proposed network framework.…”

“…In addition, there are plenty of strategies investigated to reduce the latency of SDN-enabled networks further, such as CheetahFlow [27], DIFANE [28], DevoFlow [29], and FlowShadow [30]. Mice flows account for a large portion of the total number of flows usually corresponding to the most important information in power grid, such as protection and control information.…”

Software‐defined networking (SDN): a survey

“…Designing a redundant architecture is one of the main challenging operations in a highly available SDN. Additionally, latency is another major issue facing the network providers. The latency does not only affect the traffic but also the failover times, and thus, this comes at the cost of HA.…”

Failure mitigation in software defined networking employing load type prediction

“…CheetahFlow [14] predicts various communication pairs via Support Vector Machine and reroutes them to the non-congestion path efficiently by applying blocking island paradigm. However, unlike our proposed solution, CheetahFlow mainly targets avoiding congestion along a fixed path.…”