EFastLane: Toward Bandwidth-Efficient Flow Setup in Software-Defined Networking

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Jianfeng Xu, Liming Wang, Zhen Xu

Published: 2019, Last Modified: 12 Jan 2026WCNC 2019EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: In the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) philosophy, a logically centralized control plane remotely instructs distributed network devices to forward packets over control channel. However, such a centralized design makes the control channel a bottleneck due to bandwidth fatigue, which seriously threatens the availability of the network. Existing studies economize control channel bandwidth at the expense of the visibility of most or mice flows. This paper presents EFastLane, an effective solution for bandwidth-efficient flow setup without sacrificing any flow visibility. EFastLane advocates that the controller only sends the entire processing rule to an intermediate switch of the forwarding path, and then the rule is installed bidirectionally along the path. Besides, we propose two algorithms to locate such a target switch to ensure that all switches on the path install the forwarding rule before receiving packets. Simulation experiments validate that EFastLane saves over 70% of control channel bandwidth compared to traditional SDN, while introducing the negligible flow setup time and traffic delay.