LMKS: An efficient scheme over POF switch to improve latency and throughput

Abstract

A Named Data Networking (NDN) router can maintain a record in its PIT for every Interest packet and leverage PIT table to achieve the goal of stateful forwarding. In this paper, a more general application scene that presents new challenges for stateful forwarding is considered. The network element needs to keep states of previously forwarded packets to determine the forwarding behavior of subsequent packets. We are devoted to keeping states efficiently based on Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF), which is an enhancement to current OpenFlow-based SDN forwarding architecture. Specifically, we propose using Linear-Match table to keep states (LMKS) considering the performance and potential scalability. Experimental results on Linux-based POF soft switch show that LMKS can improve forwarding latency and throughput significantly with manageable processing overhead for network applications that require keeping states.