A Split Architecture Approach to Terabyte-Scale Caching in a Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding Switch

Abstract

Research has proven that in-network caching is an effective way of eliminating redundant network traffic. For a larger cache that scales up to terabytes, a network element must utilize block storage devices. Nevertheless, accessing block devices in packet forwarding paths could be a major performance bottleneck because storage devices are prone to be much slower than memory devices concerning bandwidth and latency. Software-defined networking (SDN) has entered into all aspects of network architecture by separating the control and forwarding plane to make it more programmable and application-aware. Protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF), which is an enhancement to current OpenFlow-based SDN forwarding architecture, enhances the network programmability further. In this paper, we proposed a novel split architecture to cope with the problem of speed mismatch between high-speed packet forwarding and low-speed block I/O operation over POF switches. The issues raised by this split architecture were first explored and could be summarized as packet dependency and protocol conversion. Then, we focused on solving these two problems and proposed an efficient and scalable design. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the split architecture along with the proposed approaches for packet dependency and protocol conversion.