SDN-Based Dynamic Multipath Forwarding for Inter-Data Center Networking

Since traffic engineering (TE) in Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be much more efficiently and intelligently implemented, Multipath in SDN becomes a new option. However, Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) size become the bottleneck of SDN. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based Dynamic Flowentry-Saving Multipath (DFSM) mechanism for inter-DC WAN traffic forwarding. DFSM adopts source-destination-based multipath forwarding and latency-aware flow-based traffic splitting to save flow entries and achieve better load balancing. Our evaluations indicate that DFSM saves 15% to 30% system flow entries in different topologies compared to label-based tunneling, and also reduces average latency by 10% to 48% by consuming 8% to 20% more flow entries than EqualCost Multipath (ECMP) in less-interconnected topologies. In addition, compared to even traffic splitting, DFSM reduces the standard deviation of path latencies from 14% to 7%.