Routing method with flow entry aggregation for software-defined networking

In recent years, software-defined networking (SDN), which performs centralized network management with software, has attracted much attention. In SDN, the data plane is separated from the control plane. Network administrators can dynamically change the setting of the data plane and control routing on the control plane through a control protocol such as OpenFlow. Although packets are transmitted based on flow entries in the data plane, the number of flow entries that data plane can have is limited. It is difficult to perform flexible routing control with a small number of flow entries. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a routing method that reduces the number of flow entries, while reducing the maximum link utilization. The proposed method allocates common paths to flows that can be aggregated, considering the utilization of the links. Through numerical experiments, this paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.