Swing State
Shouxi Luo, Hongfang Yu, Laurent Vanbever · 2017
With the rise of stateful programmable data planes, a lot of the network functions that used to be implemented in the controller or at the end-hosts are now moving to the data plane to benefit from line-rate processing. Unfortunately, stateful data planes also mean more complex network updates as not only flows, but also the associated states, must now be migrated consistently to guarantee correct network behaviors. The main challenge is that data-plane states are maintained at line rate, according to possibly runtime criteria, rendering controller-driven migration impossible.