Which Flows Are Hiding Behind My Wildcard Rule? Adding Packet Sampling to OpenFlow

In OpenFlow [1], multiple switches share the same control plane which is centralized atwhat is called the OpenFlow controller. A switch only consists of a forwarding plane. Rules for forwarding individual packets (called ow entries in OpenFlow) are pushed from the controller to the switches. In a network with a high arrival rate of new ows, such as in a data center, the control trac between the switch and controller can become very high. As a consequence, routing of new ows will be slow. One way to reduce control trac is to use wildcarded ow entries. Wildcard ow entries can be used to create default routes in the network. However, since switches do not keep track of ows covered by a wildcard ow entry, the controller no longer has knowledge about individual ows. To nd out about these individual ows we propose an extension to the current OpenFlow standard to enable packet sampling of wildcard ow entries.