TY - GEN
T1 - A distributed and robust SDN control plane for transactional network updates
AU - Canini, Marco
AU - Kuznetsov, Petr
AU - Levin, Dan
AU - Schmid, Stefan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/8/21
Y1 - 2015/8/21
N2 - Software-defined networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that outsources the control of programmable network switches to a set of software controllers. The most fundamental task of these controllers is the correct implementation of the network policy, i.e., the intended network behavior. In essence, such a policy specifies the rules by which packets must be forwarded across the network. This paper studies a distributed SDN control plane that enables concurrent and robust policy implementation. We introduce a formal model describing the interaction between the data plane and a distributed control plane (consisting of a collection of fault-prone controllers). Then we formulate the problem of consistent composition of concurrent network policy updates (termed the CPC Problem). To anticipate scenarios in which some conflicting policy updates must be rejected, we enable the composition via a natural transactional interface with all-or-nothing semantics. We show that the ability of an f-resilient distributed control plane to process concurrent policy updates depends on the tag complexity, i.e., the number of policy labels (a.k.a. tags) available to the controllers, and describe a CPC protocol with optimal tag complexity f + 2.
AB - Software-defined networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that outsources the control of programmable network switches to a set of software controllers. The most fundamental task of these controllers is the correct implementation of the network policy, i.e., the intended network behavior. In essence, such a policy specifies the rules by which packets must be forwarded across the network. This paper studies a distributed SDN control plane that enables concurrent and robust policy implementation. We introduce a formal model describing the interaction between the data plane and a distributed control plane (consisting of a collection of fault-prone controllers). Then we formulate the problem of consistent composition of concurrent network policy updates (termed the CPC Problem). To anticipate scenarios in which some conflicting policy updates must be rejected, we enable the composition via a natural transactional interface with all-or-nothing semantics. We show that the ability of an f-resilient distributed control plane to process concurrent policy updates depends on the tag complexity, i.e., the number of policy labels (a.k.a. tags) available to the controllers, and describe a CPC protocol with optimal tag complexity f + 2.
U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218382
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218382
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84954211555
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
SP - 190
EP - 198
BT - 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 34th IEEE Annual Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, IEEE INFOCOM 2015
Y2 - 26 April 2015 through 1 May 2015
ER -