Participatory networking: an API for application control of SDNs

By Andrew D. Ferguson, Arjun Guha, Chen Liang, Rodrigo Fonseca, Shriram Krishnamurthi. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2013

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an API for applications to control a software-defined network (SDN). Our API is implemented by an OpenFlow controller that delegates read and write authority from the network's administrators to end users, or applications and devices acting on their behalf. Users can then work with the network, rather than around it, to achieve better performance, security, or predictable behavior. Our API serves well as the next layer atop current SDN stacks. Our design addresses the two key challenges: how to safely decompose control and visibility of the network, and how to resolve conflicts between untrusted users and across requests, while maintaining baseline levels of fairness and security. Using a real OpenFlow testbed, we demonstrate our API's feasibility through microbenchmarks, and its usefulness by experiments with four real applications modified to take advantage of it.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2283a70e539feea50f2e888863f68c2410082e0c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Efficient coflow scheduling with Varys (2014, unknown): “A large fraction of these overheads could be avoided in the presence of in-network isolation of control plane messages [21].”
Efficient Coflow Scheduling Without Prior Knowledge (2015, background): “Because ∆ must increase for Aalo to scale, sub-∆ coflows can further be improved if Aalo uses explicit switch/network support [27, 25].”
NetKAT: semantic foundations for networks (2014, background): “Other network programming languages have compilation algorithmswith proofs of correctness [5, 7, 22, 29] that painstakingly relate their high-level semantics with the low-level semantics of OpenFlow rules.”
Dynamic scheduling of network updates (2014, background): “The controller wants to update the network configuration from Figure 2(a) to 2(b).”
Planck (2014, background): “Previous work has demonstrated that routes can be installed by an SDN controller in tens of milliseconds [11, 39], but state-of-the-art network measurement systems typically spend hundreds of milliseconds or more collecting statistics [2, 4, 6, 10, 41], which limits the minimum latency of any autono”