A Comprehensive Solution for the Analysis, Validation and Optimization of SDN Data-Plane Configurations
Wejdene Saied, Faouzi Jaïdi, Adel Bouhoula · 2020
Software Defined Networking (SDN), as an emerging paradigm, offers a centralized control platform by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets (data plane) from the routing process (control plane). However, the distributed state of the Openflow rules across various flow tables and the involvement of multiple independent rules writers may lead to problems of inconsistencies and conflicts within configurations at the infrastructure level. To tackle these issues, we propose, in this paper, an offline approach to fix violations at data plane side and a fine-grained control of SDN switches flow tables. Our solution considers Flow entries Decision Diagram (FeDD) as data structure and relies on formal techniques for analyzing the policy defects and resolving misconfigurations. It allows ensuring that the operator's policies are correctly applied in an optimal way. The implemented prototype, on top of OpendayLight, of our solution and experimentations, based on a real network configurations topology, demonstrate the scalability and applicability of our approach.