AINTEC 2016

SDN is expected to play an important role in networking for LAN, WAN, cloud, NFV, IoT, 5G and etc. In one aspect, flexibility of SDN promises the creativity and freedom that the traditional network left untouched. However, having such flexibility is also subject to he capacity of SDN switches, that implements the decision made by SDN controllers. Like a routing table in routers, Flow Table is developed in SDN switches to store the instruction for handling packets. In the physical SDN switches, the entries of Flow Table, i.e. Flow Rules, are stored in TCAM, which enables very high-speed search but, at the same time, is expensive and consumes energy. In this talk, we revisit the concept of SDN and explore how we maintain the size of Flow Table as small as possible through some case studies.