Achieving efficient and fast update for multiple flows in software-defined networks

Aiming to adapt traffic dynamics, deal with network errors, perform planned maintenance, etc., flow update is carried out frequently in Software-Defined Networks (SDN) to change the data plane configuration, and how to update the flows efficiently and successfully is an important and challenging problem. In this work, we address the multi-flow update problem and present a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm, which aims at completing the update in the shortest time considering link bandwidth and flow table size constraints. By extensive simulations under real network settings, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm, which has near-optimal performance and is hundreds of times faster than the optimal solution.