NOC based Banyan OpenFlow switch for Software Defined Networks

Nowadays, network management has become difficult because of tremendous increase on IP traffic demands. At this point, a flexible and dynamic control mechanism is needed that diminishes the complexity of physical topology. Software Defined Networking (SDN), is one of the proposed next generation technologies to overcome this problem. SDN paradigm provides a simple management strategy for dummy switches in physical topology by moving their control logic to Control Plane. However, on one hand, network management becomes more scalable and flexible with this technology; on the other hand, there is an extra delay caused by OpenFlow switch architecture that should not be regarded according to Quality of Service (QoS) of a flow. This delay is arised from matching many header fields for many times while forwarding a flow in OpenFlow switch table pipeline. Therefore, we propose a novel OpenFlow switch architecture to lower temporal complexity by using Banyan Network model. The proposed model is able to forward a flow by less header matching and also protect dummy characteristic with an additional field called next table identifier. Flow forwarding in each pipeline of Banyan Network model is performed according to this next table identifier. Moreover, the advantages of Network on Chip (NOC) are also applied to OpenFlow forwarding mechanism by assigning a microcontroller to each flow table in each pipeline. Consequently, thanks to many pipelines that can serve the flows in parallel, the number of flows that are served per unit time is increased and the QoS of each flow is enhanced.