Boosting the OpenFlow control-plane message exchange performance of OpenvSwitch

The SDN (Software-defined Networking) technology is a new and important technology for next-generation networks. In the current usages of SDN, the most well-known and mature protocol between an SDN controller and SDN switches is the OpenFlow protocol. OpenvSwitch is a software switch that supports the OpenFlow protocol. An OpenvSwitch is commonly run in a physical server to connect all of the virtual machines running on the server with a real network. In addition, it can run on a stand-alone Linux system to make the Linux system and its network interface cards act as a hardware switch. This paper proposes a new design and implementation for OpenvSwitch running on Linux to boost its OpenFlow control-plane message exchange performance. Our results show that our design and implementation can improve the performance by up to 58%.