OpenFlow switches hardware cannot store all the OpenFlow rules due to a limited resource. The rule-caching scheme is one of the best solutions to solve the hardware size limitation. In OpenFlow switches, Multiple Flow Tables (MFTs) provide more flexible flow control than a single table. Exact match and wildcard match are two typical matching methods. The exact match applies to a single flow table and multiple flow tables, but the performance is low under frequently changing traffic. Many commodity switches use Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) to support fast wildcard lookups. Earlier works on wildcard-match rule-caching focus on the dependency problem caused by the overlaps of match fields. Their designs cannot handle the rule-caching problem of MFTs because they are based on a single flow table, instead of the widely used MFTs structure. So, we propose a new design named PipeCache that solves the problem of MFTs rule-caching scheme based on wildcard-match. In our design, we logically split the TCAM resources, and assign them to each flow table according to the size of each flow table. Each flow table will cache the selected rules into their assigned TCAM resources and be updated in time by our algorithms to make the most use of the limited TCAM resources. We compare our structure with the exact-match scheme and the wildcard-match scheme based on a single flow table under different cache sizes and traffic localities. Experiment results show that our design PipeCache improves cache hit rate by up to 18.2% compared to the exact-match scheme and by up to 21.2% compared to the wildcard-match scheme based on a single flow table.

OpenFlow switches in SDN use Multiple Flow Tables (MFTs) for fine-grained flow control. Commodity switches integrate hardware storage resources such as SRAM and TCAM to store flow tables to achieve high-speed lookups. Many increased flow tables are rapidly exhausting these hardware storage resources, which makes the switches have to balance high-speed search and massive storage. The rule-caching scheme is a popular method to solve this problem, which caches the most commonly used rules into hardware storage resources. The existing rule-caching schemes are based on single hardware storage resources, and they cannot flexibly adjust the caching strategy according to the traffic characteristics. Simultaneously, the deployed commodity switches face the problem of difficulty in changing the size of SRAM and TCAM. This paper innovatively proposes the MixedCache scheme, which makes full use of the hardware storage resources in the switch according to the skewed characteristics of network traffic. MixedCache stores the large flows in SRAM by exact match and stores the small flows in the TCAM by wildcard match. MixedCache does not need to change the size of the deployed switch hardware storage resources, but makes full use of existing resources. Compared with the rule-caching scheme based on the exact match, the cache hit rate can increase by up to 15.61%. Compared with the rule-caching scheme based on the wildcard match, the cache hit rate can increase by up to 29.69%.