Mind the gap: Monitoring the control-data plane consistency in software defined networks

  • Peng Zhang
  • , Hao Li
  • , Chengchen Hu
  • , Liujia Hu
  • , Lei Xiong
  • , Ruilong Wang
  • , Yuemei Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

47 Scopus citations

Abstract

How to debug large networks is always a challenging task. Software Defined Network (SDN) offers a centralized con- trol platform where operators can statically verify network policies, instead of checking configuration files device-by- device. While such a static verification is useful, it is still not enough: due to data plane faults, packets may not be forwarded according to control plane policies, resulting in network faults at runtime. To address this issue, we present VeriDP, a tool that can continuously monitor what we call control-data plane consistency, defined as the consistency between control plane policies and data plane forwarding behaviors. We prototype VeriDP with small modifications of both hardware and software SDN switches, and show that it can achieve a verification speed of 3 s per packet, with a false negative rate as low as 0.1%, for the Stanford backbone and Internet2 topologies. In addition, when verification fails, VeriDP can localize faulty switches with a probability as high as 96% for fat tree topologies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCoNEXT 2016 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages19-33
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450342926
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Dec 2016
Event12th ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, ACM CoNEXT 2016 - Irvine, United States
Duration: 12 Dec 201615 Dec 2016

Publication series

NameCoNEXT 2016 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

Conference

Conference12th ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, ACM CoNEXT 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityIrvine
Period12/12/1615/12/16

Keywords

  • Consistency
  • Software defined network
  • Verification

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