FRINGE: Improving the scalability of Ethernet DCN via efficient software-defined edge control

This paper introduces a topology-independent software-defined edge control framework named FRINGE to scale out the Ethernet Datacenter Network (DCN). FRINGE exploits programmable OpenFlow-enabled switches deployed at the edge of DCN to aggregate the forwarding rules without introducing extra packet headers. We implement the proposed FRINGE framework in an SDN prototyping environment and validate it under three typical DCN topologies including Multi-Root Tree, HyperX and Jellyfish, where three different types of DCN workloads are applied. Evaluation results reveal that FRINGE can significantly reduce the total number of rules in all network devices and suppress most of the useless broadcast packets in the DCN.