Efficient Action Computation for Compositional SDN Policies
Heng Pan, Zhenyu Li, Gaogang Xie, Peng He, Hongtao Guan, Laurent Mathy · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2017
Software-defined networking envisions the support of multiple applications collaboratively operating on the same traffic. Policies of applications therefore require composition into a rule list that represents the union of application intents. In this context, ensuring the correctness and efficiency of composition for match fields as well as the associated actions is the fundamental requirement. Prior work however focuses only on the composition of match fields and assumes simple concatenation for action composition. We show in this paper that simple concatenation can result in incorrect behavior and inefficiency of packet processing. To address this issue, we formalize the action composition problem and propose two graph-based computation models to facilitate efficient composition of action lists. Our proposed approach has been integrated into the CoVisor code base and the evaluation results show its fitness for purpose.