TabTree: A TSS-assisted bit-selecting tree scheme for packet classification with balanced rule mapping

To support fast rule updates in SDN, the Open vSwitch implements Priority Sorting Tuple Space Search (PSTSS) for its packet classifications. Although it has good performance on rule updates, it has a performance concern on table lookups. In contrast, decision tree methods are being actively investigated for high throughput, but they are not able to support fast updates because of rule replications. CutSplit, the state-of-the-art decision tree scheme, provides a novel rule update mechanism by avoiding tree reconstructions. However, its average update time is still two orders of magnitude larger than PSTSS. Meanwhile, existing decision trees are not only unbalanced but also depth unbounded, making them difficult to be optimized on FPGA. In this paper, we present a new decision tree scheme called TabTree, which achieves high performance on both lookups and updates. By mapping rules into tree nodes dynamically, a very limited number of balanced trees with bounded depths can be generated without the trouble of rule replications. Experimental results show that, TabTree has comparable update performance to PSTSS, but it outperforms PSTSS significantly in terms of number of memory accesses for packet classification. Additionally, TabTree is more practical for implementations on FPGA.