FPGA-based implementation of consistent flow configuration system for software-defined networking

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN), with its decoupled control and data planes, offers greater flexibility compared to traditional networks, making it ideal for modern, dynamic network environments. This paper proposes a consistent, protocol-independent, and flexible flow configuration system within a 100Gbps reconfigurable match tables (RMT) pipeline enhancing the capability of the open-source NIC framework Corundum for SDN on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Our prototype supports concurrent Write, Read, and Delete operations for exact, wildcard, and stateful matching, with a single thread in our server handling up to 719.42K, 751.88K, and 1.45M flows per second for Write, Read, and Delete operations, respectively, which is sufficient for production networks. Additionally, managing a single flow table requires less than 0.1% area overhead on the Xilinx AU200 platform, and each entry is handled in a single clock cycle without blocking the processing pipeline ensuring timely and consistent flow configurations. In conclusion, our prototype is highly scalable, resource-efficient, and efficient.