The construction of the Data Center(DC) using Software Defined Network(SDN) technology is a hot research topic at present. The SDN can well meet the requirements of centralized control, virtual machine deployment and migration in DC. However, the biggest difficulties are the flow optimization problem along with the scalability restrictions and the energy consumption brought by TCAM. Meanwhile, there are a mass of mice flows which have brought more cost and delay. Therefore, a new type of data plane model named the VADC is proposed herein. It applies a kind of source routing address named the vector address (VA) as the switching label. The VA defines the communication path independently. Thus, the switches can accomplish the data forwarding process solely. The VADC model has three advantages: (1) Switches don’t use the TCAM to store flow table cause that there is no need for table look-up. Thus can solve the problem of scalability in the DC significantly while reduce the cost and complexity of switches. (2) The VADC simplifies the establishment of the new flows. There is no need to download the flow table to VADC switches. Thus, the amount of control signaling consumed can reduce by about 73%. (3) We implement the VADC switch on the NetFPGA platform. The results show the hardware resources consumption of the VADC switch is only 28% of the OpenFlow switch.
