Addressing TCAM limitations in an SDN-based pub/sub system

Abstract

Content-based publish/subscribe is a popular paradigm that enables asynchronous exchange of events between decoupled applications that is practiced in a wide range of domains. Hence, extensive research has been conducted in the area of efficient large-scale pub/sub system. A more recent development are content-based pub/sub systems that utilize software-defined networking (SDN) in order to implement event-filtering in the network layer. By installing content-filters in the ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) of switches, these systems are able to achieve event filtering and forwarding at line-rate performance. While offering great performance, TCAM is also expensive, power hunger and limited in size. However, current SDN-based pub/sub systems don't address these limitations, thus using TCAM excessively. Therefore, this thesis provides techniques for constraining TCAM usage in such systems. The proposed methods enforce concrete flow limits without dropping any events by selectively merging content-filters into more coarse granular filters. The proposed algorithms leverage information about filter properties, traffic statistics, event distribution and global filter state in order to minimize the increase of unnecessary traffic introduced through merges. The proposed approach is twofold. A local enforcement algorithm ensures that the flow limit of a particular switch is never violated. This local approach is complemented by a periodically executed global optimization algorithm that tries to find a flow configuration on all switches, which minimized to increase in unnecessary traffic, given the current set of advertisements and subscriptions. For both classes, two algorithms with different properties are outlined. The proposed algorithms are integrated into the PLEROMA middleware and evaluated thoroughly in a real SDN testbed as well as in a large-scale network emulation. The evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the approaches under diverse and realistic workloads. In some cases, reducing the number of flows by more than 70% while increasing the false positive rate by less than 1% is possible.