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25
Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Survey
, 2014
"... The Internet has led to the creation of a digital society, where (almost) everything is connected and is accessible from anywhere. However, despite their widespread adoption, traditional IP networks are complex and very hard to manage. It is both difficult to configure the network according to pre- ..."
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Cited by 20 (3 self)
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The Internet has led to the creation of a digital society, where (almost) everything is connected and is accessible from anywhere. However, despite their widespread adoption, traditional IP networks are complex and very hard to manage. It is both difficult to configure the network according to pre-defined policies, and to reconfigure it to respond to faults, load and changes. To make matters even more difficult, current networks are also vertically integrated: the control and data planes are bundled together. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that promises to change this state of affairs, by breaking vertical integration, separating the network’s control logic from the underlying routers and switches, promoting (logical) centralization of network control, and introducing the ability to program the network. The separation of concerns introduced between the definition of network policies, their
A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present, and Future of Programmable Networks
, 2013
"... The idea of programmable networks has recently re-gained considerable momentum due to the emergence of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN, often referred to as a “radical new idea in networking”, promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable in-novation through net ..."
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Cited by 16 (2 self)
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The idea of programmable networks has recently re-gained considerable momentum due to the emergence of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN, often referred to as a “radical new idea in networking”, promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable in-novation through network programmability. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in programmable networks with an emphasis on SDN. We provide a historic perspective of programmable networks from early ideas to recent developments. Then we present the SDN architecture and the OpenFlow standard in particular, discuss current alternatives for implementation and testing of SDN-based protocols and services, examine current and future SDN applications, and explore promising research directions based on the SDN paradigm.
Network Innovation using OpenFlow: A Survey
- IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
, 2013
"... OpenFlow is currently the most commonly deployed ..."
Software Transactional Networking: Concurrent and Consistent Policy Composition
, 2013
"... It seems natural to imagine that SDN policy specification and control is distributed, and this paper focuses on the resulting concurrency issues. Indeed, conflicts among concurrent policy updates may result in serious inconsistencies on the data plane, even when each update is installed with perpack ..."
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Cited by 9 (4 self)
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It seems natural to imagine that SDN policy specification and control is distributed, and this paper focuses on the resulting concurrency issues. Indeed, conflicts among concurrent policy updates may result in serious inconsistencies on the data plane, even when each update is installed with perpacket consistent update semantics. This paper introduces the problem of consistent composition of concurrent policy updates. Intuitively, consistent concurrent policy composition must appear as though there is no concurrency neither between any policy updates, nor between a policy update and in-flight packets on the data plane. We propose an elegant policy composition abstraction based on a transactional interface with all-or-nothing semantics: a policy update is either committed, in which case the policy is guaranteed to compose consistently over the entire network and the update is installed in its entirety, or aborted, in which case, no packet is affected by it. Consequently, the control application logic is relieved from the cumbersome and potentially error-prone synchronization and locking tasks, and control applications are kept lightweight. In this paper, we also sketch a simple implementation of the transactional synchronization: our approach is based on fine-grained locking on network components and avoids complex state machine replication.
DISCO: Distributed Multi-domain SDN Controllers
"... Abstract—Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is now envi-sioned for Wide Area Networks (WAN) and constrained overlay networks. Such networks require a resilient, scalable and easily extensible SDN control plane. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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Abstract—Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is now envi-sioned for Wide Area Networks (WAN) and constrained overlay networks. Such networks require a resilient, scalable and easily extensible SDN control plane. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks. A DISCO controller manages its own network domain and communicates with other controllers to provide end-to-end network services. This east-west communication is based on a lightweight and highly manageable control channel. We imple-mented DISCO on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol and we evaluated it through an inter-domain topology disruption use case. I.
Dynamic Controller Provisioning in Software Defined Networks
"... Abstract—Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a new paradigm that offers the programmability required to dynamically configure and control a network. A traditional SDN implementation relies on a central controller that runs the control plane. However, in a large-scale WAN deployment, thi ..."
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Cited by 5 (3 self)
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Abstract—Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a new paradigm that offers the programmability required to dynamically configure and control a network. A traditional SDN implementation relies on a central controller that runs the control plane. However, in a large-scale WAN deployment, this rudimentary centralized approach has several limitations related to performance and scalability. To address these issues, recent proposals have advocated deploying multiple controllers that work cooperatively to control a network. Nonetheless, this approach drags in an interesting problem, which we call the Dynamic Controller Provisioning Problem (DCPP). DCPP dynamically adapts the number of controllers and their locations with changing network conditions, in order to minimize flow setup time and communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a framework for deploying multiple controllers within an WAN. Our framework dynamically adjusts the number of active controllers and delegates each controller with a subset of Openflow switches according to network dynamics while ensuring minimal flow setup time and communication overhead. To this end, we formulate the optimal controller provisioning problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) and propose two heuristics to solve it. Simulation results show that our solution minimizes flow setup time while incurring very low communication overhead. I.
The Case for Reliable Software Transactional Networking
- CoRR
"... Software-defined networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that out-sources the control of packet-forwarding 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 ..."
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Cited by 4 (2 self)
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Software-defined networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that out-sources the control of packet-forwarding 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 initiates the study of the SDN control plane as a distributed system. 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. The composition is enabled via a transactional interface with all-or-nothing semantics. The system behaves as though committed updates are installed atomically and every data packet traverses the network instantaneously, respecting a sequential composition of previously installed committed updates. Updates that cannot be composed are aborted and do not affect the data plane. We show that in the asynchronous environment, it is impossible to achieve consistent policy composition that tolerates a single controller crash. We then discuss stronger variants of the model that allow for solving the problem and study algorithmic complexities of such solutions.
Theory Comput
, 1994
"... Abstract—With the trends of software-defined networking (SDN) deployment, all network devices rely on a single controller will create a scalability issue. There are several novel approaches proposed in control plane to achieve scalability by dividing the whole networks into multiple SDN domains. How ..."
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Cited by 4 (2 self)
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Abstract—With the trends of software-defined networking (SDN) deployment, all network devices rely on a single controller will create a scalability issue. There are several novel approaches proposed in control plane to achieve scalability by dividing the whole networks into multiple SDN domains. However, in order to prevent broadcast storm, it is important to avoid loops in connections with OpenFlow devices or traditional equipments. Therefore, one SDN domain can only have exactly one connection to any other domains, which will cause limitation when deploying SDN networks. Motivated by this problem, we propose a mechanism which is able to work properly even the loops occurred between any two controller domains. Furthermore, this mechanism can also manage link resources more efficiently to improve the transfer performance. Our evaluation shows that the transmissions between hosts from different areas are guaranteed even if the network topology contains loops among multiple SDN domains. Moreover, the proposed mechanism outperforms current method in transferring bandwidth. Keywords-Software-defined networking; OpenFlow; multiple domains; loop topology. I.
Challenges in the Emulation of Large Scale Software Defined Networks
"... Researchers and practitioners alike have long relied upon emulation to evaluate the performance of networked applications and protocols without tying up production infrastructure or committing to expensive hardware purchases. As software defined networks (SDN) become more prevalent, it is increasing ..."
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Cited by 3 (2 self)
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Researchers and practitioners alike have long relied upon emulation to evaluate the performance of networked applications and protocols without tying up production infrastructure or committing to expensive hardware purchases. As software defined networks (SDN) become more prevalent, it is increasingly useful to be able to accurately emulate their behavior. Tools like Mininet-HiFi have demonstrated the viability of small-scale SDN emulation, but emulated network size is limited by the hardware resources of a single machine. Unfortunately, there are many SDN applications that can only be evaluated meaningfully at scale. Traditionally, researchers have overcome similar challenges by scaling the capacity of the network links, the emulated workload, or both. We observe that shrinking a network arbitrarily to fit into a fixed set of emulation resources has fundamental limitations that impact the fidelity of results, especially in the context of SDN. In particular, we demonstrate cases where emulation yields false positives—poor network behavior that manifests only in emulation—and false negatives, where a real deployment would suffer issues not apparent in emulation. We discuss strategies that might be used to combat these effects and their limitations. 1
ElastiCon: An Elastic Distributed SDN Controller
"... Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a popular paradigm for centralized control in many modern networking scenarios such as data centers and cloud. For large data centers hosting many hun-dreds of thousands of servers, there are few thousands of switches that need to be managed in a centrali ..."
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Cited by 2 (0 self)
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Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a popular paradigm for centralized control in many modern networking scenarios such as data centers and cloud. For large data centers hosting many hun-dreds of thousands of servers, there are few thousands of switches that need to be managed in a centralized fashion, which cannot be done using a single controller node. Previous works have proposed distributed controller architectures to address scalability issues. A key limitation of these works, however, is that the mapping be-tween a switch and a controller is statically configured, which may result in uneven load distribution among the controllers as traffic conditions change dynamically. To address this problem, we propose ElastiCon, an elastic dis-tributed controller architecture in which the controller pool is dy-namically grown or shrunk according to traffic conditions. To ad-dress the load imbalance caused due to spatial and temporal varia-tions in the traffic conditions, ElastiCon automatically balances the load across controllers thus ensuring good performance at all times irrespective of the traffic dynamics. We propose a novel switch mi-gration protocol for enabling such load shifting, which conforms with the Openflow standard. We further design the algorithms for controller load balancing and elasticity. We also build a prototype of ElastiCon and evaluate it extensively to demonstrate the efficacy of our design.
