Testbeds and Research Infrastructure: Development of Networks and Communities. 9th International ICST Conference, TridentCom 2014, Guangzhou, China, May 5-7, 2014, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Investigating the Performance of Link Aggregation on OpenFlow Switches

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_19,
        author={Toan Nguyen-Duc and Hoang Tran-Viet and Kien Nguyen and Quang Minh and Son Ngo and Shigeki Yamada},
        title={Investigating the Performance of Link Aggregation on OpenFlow Switches},
        proceedings={Testbeds and Research Infrastructure: Development of Networks and Communities. 9th International ICST Conference, TridentCom 2014, Guangzhou, China, May 5-7, 2014, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={TRIDENTCOM},
        year={2014},
        month={11},
        keywords={Link aggregation Resilient Aggregation bandwidth  Openflow switch Evaluation},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_19}
    }
    
  • Toan Nguyen-Duc
    Hoang Tran-Viet
    Kien Nguyen
    Quang Minh
    Son Ngo
    Shigeki Yamada
    Year: 2014
    Investigating the Performance of Link Aggregation on OpenFlow Switches
    TRIDENTCOM
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_19
Toan Nguyen-Duc1,*, Hoang Tran-Viet1,*, Kien Nguyen,*, Quang Minh2,*, Son Ngo1,*, Shigeki Yamada2,*
  • 1: Hanoi University of Science and Technology
  • 2: National Institute of Informatics
*Contact email: toan.nguyenduc1@hust.edu.vn, hoang.tranviet@hust.edu.vn, kienng@nii.ac.jp, quangtran@nii.ac.jp, sonnh@soict.hust.edu.vn, shigeki@nii.ac.jp

Abstract

In this paper, we extensively explore the operation of Link Aggregation (LA) on OpenFlow switches in comparison to the LA in conventional switches. The comparison of two LA implementations has been conducted in a real testbed under the UDP and TCP traffic loads. The testbed includes Pica8 P-3925 switches, which support two modes: an OpenFlow switch (i.e., using Open vSwitch) and a conventional switch (i.e., using the operating system called XorPlus). The evaluation results show that two LA implementations achieve similar performance in improving throughput. However, the XorPlus implementation provides a better resilience than the other. Specifically, the LA implementation on XorPlus spends less than 1.49538 seconds to switch the TCP traffic on the faulty link to the other links of a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) while the switchover time is four times longer on the Open vSwitch. In the case of UDP traffic, the maximum switchover time on the Open vSwitch is twice the one on XorPlus.