Parallel Consistent Network Updates
Report ID: TR-958-13Author: Nedev, Nayden
Date: 2013-06-00
Pages: 39
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Abstract:
Network con figuration changes are a frequent operation performed by network admin- istrators. Unfortunately, these changes can result in a wide range of problems such as network outages, security vulnerabilities or worse overall network performance. A recent result in this area proposes the notion of consistent network update - an update that preserves certain properties when updating from one network policy to another. The authors of the mentioned work describe a per-packet consistent update algorithm that guarantees that every packet in the network traverses either the old policy or the new one but not some mixture of the two. With the advent of software-defi ned networking, development of centralized, tightly-coordinated applications with strong global correctness properties is now possible. However, it is an open problem how to bring more parallelism to these applications and how to leverage general-purpose multicore and multiprocessor machines to improve their performance. In this work, we propose two parallelized versions of the per-packet consistent update mechanism. We implement them on top of Floodlight - a new multi-threaded software-defi ned networking controller platform. We evaluate their performance on two example applications - a network-wide host location learning and a shortest-path routing application.