Deterministic OpenFlow: Performance Evaluation of SDN Hardware for Avionic Networks

Due to special requirements avionic networking devices are typically quite expensive. One way to reduce costs is to make use of commercial off the shelf devices and configure them in a way that gives similar performance. In this paper we evaluate the use of OpenFlow in the avionics environment in terms of performance and configuration. The main feature of OpenFlow is fine-grained access to the switch's forwarding plane. While it was primarily designed to offer high configurability and reduction of cost through harmonization of interfaces, in newer versions OpenFlow added support for traffic policing. In OpenFlow this is realized with meters that allow for quality of service enforcement on a hardware level as well as an arbitrary mapping of meters to flows. This paper shows how to make use of OpenFlow's meter commands to achieve deterministic behavior and discusses its advantages and shortcomings. We then implement the proposed solution on a commercial off the shelf OpenFlow switch and compare the switching performance to a state of the art avionics switch used in current aircraft.