OREANDA-NEWS. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation announced the launch of a prototype high-performance SDN software switch. The research leading up to its launch was carried out as part of a "Research and Development of Network Virtualization Technology" program commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The switch provides the highest level of performance yet achieved by an SDN software switch in transferring data packets at a 10 Gbps wire rate.

While SDN has already been introduced in corporate networks, such as those at data centers,NTT has developed a prototype SDN software switch that achieves high performance even though large scale flow entries are set, as a technical element to apply SDN to wide area networks such as those of telecommunications carriers and Internet providers.

Although 100K entries are added into its flow tables and each packet header must be rewritten, this switch still transfers large packets at a 10 Gbps wire rate. This makes it one of the highest performance SDN software switches ever. After its flow tables are extended to enable handling of larger entries, it will become applicable not only to data center networks but also to wide area networks. This will enable easy development of new network services and new protocols.