Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Onix: a distributed control platform for large-scale production networks
OSDI'10 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
Can the production network be the testbed?
OSDI'10 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
Frenetic: a network programming language
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Abstractions for network update
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
Logically centralized?: state distribution trade-offs in software defined networks
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
The controller placement problem
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
Kandoo: a framework for efficient and scalable offloading of control applications
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
Hierarchical policies for software defined networks
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
Outsourcing the routing control logic: better internet routing based on SDN principles
Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
Composing software-defined networks
nsdi'13 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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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 per-packet 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 light-weight. 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.