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06 Dec 2015

Flow level State Transition as a New Switch Primitive for SDN

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2631439

ABSTRACT In software-defined networking, the controller installs flow-based rules at switches either proactively or reactively. The reactive approach allows controller applications to make dynamic decisions about incoming traffic, but performs worse than the proactive one due to the controller involvement. To support dynamic applications with better performance, we propose FAST (Flow-level State Transitions) as a new switch primitive for software-defined networks. With FAST, the controller simply preinstalls a state machine and switches can automatically record flow state transitions by matching incoming packets to installed filters. FAST can support a variety of dynamic applications, and can be readily implemented with today’s commodity switch components and software switches.

FAST (Flow-level State Transitions) as a new switch abstraction. FAST allows the controller to proactively program state transitions, and allows switches to run dynamic actions based on local information.

FAST includes three parts

  1. an abstraction … program their state machines … ;
  2. a FAST controller that translates state machines to the data plane API and manages the interaction of local state machines with network-wide policies;
  3. a FAST data plane that includes a pipeline of tables to support state machines with commodity switch components.

6. CHALLENGES AND FUTURE WORK

Dynamic actions at switches
DevoFlow [13]
State machine abstraction
[7, 30]
Local Controller Logic
Several works ✓ at the controller side([17, 21, 33]) recognized the ability of separating a control policy to local and network-wide logics.

8. CONCLUSION

We observe that many networking functions require changing the actions within the same flow based on the current flow state. Thus we propose flow-level state transitions (FAST) as a new primitive for SDN. Compared to the primitive of flow-based rules, FAST supports more flexible networking tasks, improves the performance and scalability of the SDN controller, and can be easily implemented with commodity switch components.

reference