Design of a stateless low-latency router architecture for green software-defined networking

Expanding software defined networking (SDN) to transport networks requires new strategies to deal with the large number of flows that future core networks will have to face. New south-bound protocols within SDN have been proposed to benefit from having control plane detached from the data plane offering a cost-and energy-efficient forwarding engine. This paper presents an overview of a new approach named KeyFlow to simultaneously reduce latency, jitter, and power consumption in core network nodes. Results on an emulation platform indicate that round trip time (RTT) can be reduced above 50% compared to the reference protocol OpenFlow, specially when flow tables are densely populated. Jitter reduction has been demonstrated experimentally on a NetFPGA-based platform, and 57.3% power consumption reduction has been achieved.