Renaissance: A Self-Stabilizing Distributed SDN Control Plane using In-band Communications

TL;DR

Renaissance introduces a self-stabilizing, fault-tolerant distributed control plane for SDNs that ensures reliable communication and management despite arbitrary failures, enhancing dependability in network control systems.

Contribution

This paper presents novel self-stabilizing algorithms for in-band distributed SDN control planes, ensuring fault tolerance and bounded recovery time after failures.

Findings

Algorithms guarantee bounded communication delay after failures

Prototype implementation demonstrates practical feasibility

Rigorous worst-case analysis confirms robustness

Abstract

By introducing programmability, automated verification, and innovative debugging tools, Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) are poised to meet the increasingly stringent dependability requirements of today's communication networks. However, the design of fault-tolerant SDNs remains an open challenge. This paper considers the design of dependable SDNs through the lenses of self-stabilization - a very strong notion of fault-tolerance. In particular, we develop algorithms for an in-band and distributed control plane for SDNs, called Renaissance, which tolerate a wide range of failures. Our self-stabilizing algorithms ensure that after the occurrence of arbitrary failures, (i) every non-faulty SDN controller can reach any switch (or another controller) within a bounded communication delay (in the presence of a bounded number of failures) and (ii) every switch is managed by a controller. We evaluate Renaissance through a rigorous worst-case analysis as well as a prototype implementation (based on OVS and Floodlight, and Mininet).