AggFlow: Scalable and efficient network address virtualization on software defined networking

In this paper, we propose AggFlow, a new address vir- tualization scheme for high scalability and resource effi- ciency. AggFlow is intended to provide complete ad- dress virtualization while incurring low overhead for physical switches and the control channel. To reduce overhead of address virtualization, we propose mapping- less address virtualization. We additionally introduce hop-by-hop-based forwarding, which aggregates ow rules installed in physical switches. This leads to efficient use of ternary content addressable memory and bandwidth of the control channel. Our evaluation using Mininet with simple linear and tree topologies, the ow table size of the core switch is reduced up to 1/16 for both topologies, and the control channel traffic decreases by 51% and 29% respectively. Furthermore, we measure the overhead incurred from AggFlow. Compared to OpenVirteX, AggFlow increases control plane delay by 0.1 ms, only 0.4% increase of CPU usage, and no change of throughput for UDP traffic.