Improving the Global Service Time in SDN Through the Use of the Active Traffic First Approach: A Heuristic Solution

A TCAM (Ternary Content-Addressable Memory) is a type of memory used in the flow tables of Software Defined Networking (SDN) nodes. Although these memories are very fast, their size is limited. This has an impact on the number of rules that can be installed, and an inefficient rule management can lead to a degradation of the network quality of service. In this work, an heuristic algorithm named Active Traffic First (ATF) is proposed to efficiently manage the content of the flow tables of the SDN nodes in order to maximize the Global Service Time (GST) of the active flows in the network. The idea behind ATF is adopted by deleting flows that are not being used in case a new flow aims to be served and there is no space available. Experimental results show that ATF outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions by improving GST and reducing re-installations.