Towards correct network virtualization
Soudeh Ghorbani, Brighten Godfrey · 2014
In SDN, the underlying infrastructure is usually abstracted for applications that can treat the network as a logical or virtual entity. Commonly, the ``mappings" between virtual abstractions and their actual physical implementations are not one-to-one, e.g., a single "big switch" abstract object might be implemented using a distributed set of physical devices. A key question is, what abstractions could be mapped to multiple physical elements while faithfully preserving their native semantics? E.g., can an application developer always expect her abstract "big switch" to act exactly as a physical big switch, despite being implemented using multiple physical switches in reality?