This paper explores the impact of the timeout length on performance, measured through the miss rate, and table occupancy. It finds that as timeouts increase, the miss rate decays exponentially while the table size grows near-linearly. We observe there is an operating point where any further increases in the timeout lead to insignificant reductions in the miss rate while unnecessarily swelling e...

Performance issues of OpenFlow switches are attracting a lot of attention owing to the potential large-scale deployment of software-defined devices. This paper presents theOFBench which is an automatic test suite for evaluating the performance of OpenFlow switches. The design, as part of the Automation Control Test System (ACTS) development, is based on a controller-agent architecture which all...

Over the last years, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have become an increasing threat on the Internet, with recent attacks reaching traffic volumes of up to 500 Gbps. To make matters worse, web-based facilities that offer “DDoS-as-a-service” (i.e., Booters) allow for the layman to launch attacks in the order of tens of Gbps in exchange for only a few euros. A recent development in ...

When dealing with node or link failures in SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN), the network capability to establish an alternative path depends on controller reachability and on the round-trip times (RTTs) between controller and involved switches. Moreover, current SDN data plane abstractions for failure detection, such as OpenFlow “Fast-failover”, do not allow programmers to tweak switches’ detec...

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm in which the network provides users with content instead of communication channels between hosts. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an approach that promises to enable the continuous evolution of networking architectures. In this paper we propose and discuss solutions to support ICN by using SDN concepts. We focus on an ICN fr...

Data center networks are designed for satisfying the data transmission demand of densely interconnected hosts in the data center. The network topology and routing mechanism can affect the performance and latency significantly. Nowadays, the fat-tree network is one of the most widely used topologies for data center networks. Network engineers also adopt load balancing methods in the design of ro...

In this paper we propose a novel hardware-software co-design vision that aims at enhancing flexibility and reusability of hardware based packet forwarding engines. In particular, we move on the path of the well-known OpenFlow architecture. However, although such approach is certainly powerful, it is biased towards routing-related applications: its main goal is to allow the software control plan...

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that is expected to revolutionize computer networks. Methods for measuring Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as bandwidth utilization, packet loss, and delay have been recently introduced in literature for SDN-based scenarios, but they required almost invariably a completely different approach with respect to traditional network e...