ARP Overhead Reduction Framework for Software Defined Data Centers

Software defined Data Center Network (SDDCN) architectures need flexibility, scalability, and improved analytics for reliable networks. However, as the traffic load of the network grows a substantial collapse in the network performance has been observed. Huge amount of network broadcasts mainly Address Resolution Protocol (ARPs), is the dominant factor contributing towards this performance degradation. However, to the best of our knowledge existing solutions do not focus on reducing the redundant ARPs processed by controller especially for loop topologies of large scale SDDCNs. We propose a framework ARP Overhead Reduction (ARP-OR) to not only reduce the ARP broadcasts more effectively but also to suppress all the redundant ARPs before the control plane processes them. ARP-OR finds its scalability for tree, fattree, and its variant diamond topology. It is prototyped on RYU controller and experiments were conducted on Mininet emulator. ARP-OR has convincingly reduced the ARP traffic compared to existing approaches.