Abstract

ABSTRACT The ability to manage individual flows is a major benefit of Software-Defined Networking. The overheads of this fine-grained control, e.g. initial flow setup delay, can overcome the benefits, for example when we have many time-sensitive short flows. Coarse-grained control of groups of flows, on the other hand, can be very complex: each packet may match multiple rules, which requires conflict resolution. In this paper, we present ReWiFlow, a restricted class of OpenFlow wildcard rules (the fundamental way to control groups of flows in OpenFlow), which allows managing groups of flows with flexibility and without loss of performance. We demonstrate how ReWiFlow can be used to implement applications such as dynamic proactive routing. We also present a generalization of ReWiFlow, called MultiReWiFlow, and show how it can be used to efficiently represent access control rules collected from Stanford's backbone network.