Abstractions for network update

ions for Network Update Mark Reitblatt Cornell Nate Foster Cornell Jennifer Rexford Princeton Cole Schlesinger Princeton David Walker Princeton Configuration changes are a common source of instability in networks, leading to outages, performance disruptions, and security vulnerabilities. Even when the initial and final configurations are correct, the update process itself often steps through intermediate configurations that exhibit incorrect behaviors. This paper introduces the notion of consistent network updates—updates that are guaranteed to preserve well-defined behaviors when transitioning between configurations. We identify two distinct consistency levels, per-packet and per-flow, and we present general mechanisms for implementing them in Software-Defined Networks using switch APIs like OpenFlow. We develop a formal model of OpenFlow networks, and prove that consistent updates preserve a large class of properties. We describe our prototype implementation, including sev...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Mark Reitblatt, Nate Foster, Jennifer Rexford, Cole Schlesinger, David Walker
• Keywords: Communications, Computer Communication Networks, Jennifer Rexford, Nate Foster, SIGCOMM 2012