The Case for Making Tight Control Plane Latency Guarantees in SDN Switches
Huan Chen, Theophilus Benson · 2017
SDN controllers demand tight performance guarantees over the control plane actions performed by SDN switches. For example, traffic engineering techniques that frequently reconfigure the network require guarantees on the speed of gathering data from the network and the speed of reconfiguring the network. Yet, modern switches provide no guarantees for these control plane actions, e.g., inserting rules or gathering statistics. In fact, initial experiments demonstrate that unpredictability in control plane actions, specifically rule insertion, can inflate application completion times by a factor of 4X!