Democratic Resolution of Resource Conflicts Between SDN Control Programs
Alvin AuYoung, Yadi Ma, Sujata Banerjee, Jeongkeun Lee, Puneet Kumar Sharma, Yoshio Turner, Chen Liang, Jeffrey C. Mogul · 2014
Resource conflicts are inevitable on any shared infrastructure. In Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), different controller modules with diverse objectives may be installed on the SDN controller. Each module independently generates resource requests that may conflict with the objectives of a different module. For example, a controller module for maintaining high availability may want resource allocations that require too much core network bandwidth and thus conflict with another module that aims to minimize core bandwidth usage. In such a situation, it is imperative to identify and install resource allocations that achieve network wide global objectives that may not be known to individual modules, e.g., high availability with acceptable bandwidth usage. This problem has received only limited attention, with most prior work focused on detecting, avoiding, and resolving rule-level conflicts in the context of OpenFlow.