The Hardware and Software Co-Design of a Stackable OpenFlow Switch for Software Defined Networking

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This paper presents the hardware and software codesign of a highly scalable Software Defined Networking (SDN) switch supporting Openflow protocol. To be specific, in order to strike a balance between flexibility, energy efficiency and performance, the switching core is realized based on an embedded System-On-Chip (SoC) platform integrating an ARM processor with FPGA fabrics. Furthermore, the proposed switch achieves high degree of scalability so that it is more applicable for large dimension networks featuring with large number of switches and network ports. In particular, a dedicated high-speed channel is designed in the proposed switch architecture so that multiple switches can be interconnected together to become a stacked switch. The detailed structures of the hardware and software elements of the switch architecture are illustrated in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed stackable OpenFlow switch achieves high-throughput processing with essential flexibility and scalability.