FastUp: Compute a Better TCAM Update Scheme in Less Time for SDN Switches

Abstract

While widely used for flow tables in SDN switches, TCAM faces challenges for rule updates. Both the computation time and interrupt time need to be short. We propose FastUp, a new TCAM update algorithm, which improves the previous dynamic programming-based algorithms. Evaluations show that FastUp shortens the computation time by 40~100× and the interrupt time by 1.2~2.5×. In addition, we are the first to prove the NP-hardness of the optimal TCAM update problem, and provide a practical method to evaluate an algorithm’s degree of optimality. Experiments show that FastUp’s optimality reaches 90%.