Software-defined networking (SDN) provides a new network architecture by decoupling
control and data planes. By performing the tasks of the control plane in a centralized
manner, SDN enables the capability of programmability and flexibility to fulfill various types
of network applications. The decoupling of control and data planes also brings additional
messaging overhead and latency to degrade the efficiency of flow statistics collection, but
timely and accurate flow statistics are critical for numerous SDN applications. In this article …