Tag-and-Forward: A source-routing enabled data plane for OpenFlow Fat-Tree Networks

Abstract: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has turned the Data Center Network (DCN) environment into a more flexible one by decoupling control plane from data plane, allowing an innovative and easily extensible network management solutions. Nowadays, OpenFlow is the most successful protocol for SDN. However, SDN based on OpenFlow protocol presents performance issues on forwarding table increasing and packet match cost. Our proposal named Tag-and-Forward (TF) is a data plane that reduces the number of flow table required in the Fat-Tree software-defined DCNs to optimize forwarding. The results noticebly outperformed RTT and packet transmission rate when compared to usual OpenFlow data plane.