Rethinking Flow Classification in SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) increasingly attracts more researchers as well as industry attentions. Most of current SDN packet processing approaches classify packets based on matching a set of fields on the packet against a flow table and then applying an action on the packet. We argue we can simplify this mechanism using single-field classification and reduce the overhead. We propose a tag-based packet classification architecture to reduce filtering and flow management overhead. Then, we show how to use this extra capacity to perform application layer classification for different purposes. In this work-in-progress paper we demonstrate our preliminary evaluation results to indicate the effectiveness of the proposal.