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In-Band Synchronization for Distributed SDN Control Planes

Published: 11 January 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Control planes of forthcoming Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) will be distributed: to ensure availability and fault-tolerance, to improve load-balancing, and to reduce overheads, modules of the control plane should be physically distributed. However, in order to guarantee consistency of network operation, actions performed on the data plane by different controllers may need to be synchronized, which is a nontrivial task. In this paper, we propose a synchronization framework for control planes based on atomic transactions, implemented in-band, on the data-plane switches. We argue that this in-band approach is attractive as it keeps the failure scope local and does not require additional out-of-band coordination mechanisms. It allows us to realize fundamental consensus primitives in the presence of controller failures, and we discuss their applications for consistent policy composition and fault-tolerant control-planes. Interestingly, by using part of the data plane configuration space as a shared memory and leveraging the match-action paradigm, we can implement our synchronization framework in today's standard OpenFlow protocol, and we report on our proof-of-concept implementation.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 46, Issue 1
    January 2016
    68 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/2875951
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 11 January 2016
    Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 46, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. distributed control planes
    2. in-band mechanisms
    3. software-defined networking

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    • (2024)Mitigating the impact of controller failures on QoS robustness for software-defined wide area networksComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2023.110096238(110096)Online publication date: Jan-2024
    • (2023)A Comprehensive Survey of In-Band Control in SDN: Challenges and OpportunitiesElectronics10.3390/electronics1206126512:6(1265)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Distributed Controller Placement in Software-Defined Networks with Consistency and Interoperability ProblemsJournal of Electrical and Computer Engineering10.1155/2023/64669962023Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
    • (2023)Maintaining the Network Performance of Software-Defined WANs With Efficient Critical RoutingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333540421:2(2240-2252)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Dynamic Upgrade to SDN From a Global Perspective: Model and Its Heuristic SolutionsIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.327887720:4(4751-4764)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Joint Controller Placement and Control-Service Connection in Hybrid-Band ControlIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2023.326422011:3(3139-3152)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
    • (2022)E-Government Cybersecurity Modeling in the Context of Software-Defined NetworksCybersecurity Measures for E-Government Frameworks10.4018/978-1-7998-9624-1.ch001(1-21)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2022
    • (2022)Packet-in request redirection: A load-balancing mechanism for minimizing control plane response time in SDNsJournal of Systems Architecture10.1016/j.sysarc.2022.102590129(102590)Online publication date: Aug-2022
    • (2022) RenaissanceJournal of Computer and System Sciences10.1016/j.jcss.2022.02.001127:C(91-121)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
    • (2022)Evaluation of the robustness of SDN controllers ONOS and ODLComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2022.109403219:COnline publication date: 24-Dec-2022
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