OpenFlow, a key data plane protocol in software‐defined networking (SDN), relies heavily on ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) to achieve high‐speed packet matching. However, as OpenFlow evolves to support a broader set of match fields, the demand for TCAM storage grows significantly due to its support for arbitrary wildcards. To address this challenge, this paper introduces DECTCAM, a mathematical model designed to decrease TCAM space consumption without compromising OpenFlow’s flexibility or functionality. DECTCAM identifies and classifies redundancies across match fields into three distinct types and applies tailored compression strategies interfield merging, field mapping, and intrafield compression to optimize flow entry representations. These techniques produce more compact flow entries, which are then deployed to TCAM for efficient matching. Simulation results demonstrate that DECTCAM can decrease TCAM usage by nearly 78%, with consistent performance even as the flow table scales, all while preserving the original behavior of the OpenFlow rules.
Ali et al. (Thu,) studied this question.