Tesseract: A 4D Network Control Plane

We present Tesseract, an experimental system that enables the direct control of a computer network that is under a single administrative domain. Tesseract’s design is based on the 4D architecture, which advocates the decomposition of the network control plane into decision, dissemination, discovery, and data planes. Tesseract provides two primary abstract services to enable direct control: the dissemination service that carries opaque control information from the network decision element to the nodes in the network, and the node configuration service which provides the interface for the decision element to command the nodes in the network to carry out the desired control policies. Tesseract is designed to enable easy innovation. The neighbor discovery, dissemination and node configuration services, which are agnostic to network control policies, are the only distributed functions implemented in the switch nodes. A variety of network control policies can be implemented outside of s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Hong Yan, David A. Maltz, T. S. Eugene Ng, Hemant Gogineni, Hui Zhang, Zheng Cai
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Network Control, Network Control Policies, NSDI 2007, Tesseract