Modeling and Analysis of SDN Control Applications using Vector Spaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces SDN-VSA, a novel framework that models SDN control applications as affine transformations in vector spaces, enabling better reasoning about their behavior and impact on network information bases.

Contribution

It proposes a new modeling framework, SDN-VSA, that incorporates application logic into network models using affine transformations, addressing limitations of existing frameworks.

Findings

SDN-VSA effectively models SDN control applications as affine transformations.

The framework provides an analytical approach to understand application impacts.

A practical use-case demonstrates the framework's applicability.

Abstract

Unlike traditional networks which are statically configured, SDN control applications are dynamic and are becoming more heterogeneous and complex. There is a great need for a framework to reason about the behavior of the various SDN applications. To the best of our knowledge, current network modeling frameworks were not designed to incorporate the application logic into their models, and thus can not be used to accurately model the application. In this paper, we suggest the possibility of leveraging the impact which control applications assert on the network information base to reason about the behavior of such applications. Based on that, we propose SDN-VSA, a framework that models SDN control applications as a set of affine transformations in some vector space. Finally, we present an analytical formulation for such framework, and discuss a use-case. For simplicity, we only consider the case of OpenFlow version 1.0.