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Building Efficient And Reliable Software-Defined Networks

Building Efficient And Reliable Software-Defined Networks

Trending PhD Thesis on Building Efficient And Reliable Software-Defined Networks

Research Area:  Software Defined Networks

Abstract:

   Software-defined networking (SDN) promises flexible control of computer networks by orchestrating switches in the network data plane through a centralized controller. However, despite this promise, operators used to fast and fault-tolerant routing using traditional protocols face three important problems while deploying SDN. One, the control plane timescales are too slow to enforce effective load balancing in order to efficiently use the available network capacity. Second, the commodity SDN switches have limited memory to enforce fine-grained policy rules which undermines the promise of flexible control. Third, the centralized controller itself is a single point of failure which is unacceptable for operators used to running distributed fault-tolerant network protocols.
   This thesis aims to mitigate these problems using novel algorithms that exploit advanced data plane capabilities and enhancements to the control plane software. At the same time, we also provide simple abstractions on top of these systems so that network operators writing control programs need not worry about low-level details of the underlying implementation mechanisms. First, we will present HULA, which gives the abstraction of one big efficient non-blocking switch. Instead of asking the control plane to choose the best path for each new flow, HULA efficiently routes traffic on least congested paths in the network. HULA uses advanced hardware data plane capabilities to infer global congestion information and uses that information to do fine-grained load balancing at RTT timescales.
   Together these systems propose a new SDN paradigm where basic routing is done efficiently at data plane timescales, policy enforcement is done scalable with the help of software data planes and the control plane is fault-tolerant. This new architecture has the properties of fast routing and fault-tolerance of traditional networks while delivering the promise of efficient enforcement of fine-grained control policies.

Name of the Researcher:  Naga Praveen Kumar Katta

Name of the Supervisor(s):  Rexford

Year of Completion:  2016

University:  Princeton University

Thesis Link:   Home Page Url