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Participatory networking: an API for application control of SDNs

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
    August 2013
    580 pages
    ISBN:9781450320566
    DOI:10.1145/2486001
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 27 August 2013
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 43, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. openflow
  2. participatory networking
  3. software-defined networks

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