research-article

Free access

Towards correct network virtualization

Authors:

Soudeh Ghorbani,

Brighten GodfreyAuthors Info & Claims

HotSDN '14: Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking

Pages 109 - 114

https://doi.org/10.1145/2620728.2620754

Published: 22 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In SDN, the underlying infrastructure is usually abstracted for applications that can treat the network as a logical or virtual entity. Commonly, the ``mappings" between virtual abstractions and their actual physical implementations are not one-to-one, e.g., a single "big switch" abstract object might be implemented using a distributed set of physical devices. A key question is, what abstractions could be mapped to multiple physical elements while faithfully preserving their native semantics? E.g., can an application developer always expect her abstract "big switch" to act exactly as a physical big switch, despite being implemented using multiple physical switches in reality?

We show that the answer to that question is "no" for existing virtual-to-physical mapping techniques: behavior can differ between the virtual "big switch" and the physical network, providing incorrect application-level behavior. We also show that that those incorrect behaviors occur despite the fact that the most pervasive and commonly-used correctness invariants, such as per-packet consistency, are preserved throughout. These examples demonstrate that for practical notions of correctness, new systems and a new analytical framework are needed. We take the first steps by defining end-to-end correctness, a correctness condition that focuses on applications only, and outline a research vision to obtain virtualization systems with correct virtual to physical mappings.

References

[1]

OpenFlow Switch Specification, version 1.4.0. Technical report, Open Networking Foundation, 2013.

[2]

ONS 2014 Keynote: A. Greenberg, Microsoft Azure, 2014.

[3]

ONS 2014 Keynote: A. Vahdat, Google, 2014.

[4]

M. Casado, M. J. Freedman, J. Pettit, J. Luo, N. Gude, N. McKeown, and S. Shenker. Rethinking Enterprise Network Control. CCR, 2009.

Digital Library

[5]

M. Casado, T. Koponen, R. Ramanathan, and S. Shenker. Virtualizing the network forwarding plane. In PRESTO, 2010.

Digital Library

[6]

A. Curtis, J. Mogul, J. Tourrilhes, P. Yalagandula, P. Sharma, and S. Banerjee. Devoflow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks. SIGCOMM, 2011.

Digital Library

[7]

S. Ghorbani and B. Godfrey. Towards Correct Network Virtualization. Technical report, CS UIUC, 2014. http://goo.gl/ks9Fp9.

[8]

S. Ghorbani, C. Schlesinger, M. Monaco, E. Keller, M. Caesar, J. Rexford, and D. Walker. Transparent, Live Migration of a Software-Defined Network. Technical report, CS UIUC, 2013. http://goo.gl/yzVgGN.

[9]

A. Greenberg, N. Jain, S. Kandula, C. Kim, P. Lahiri, D. Maltz, P. Patel, and S. Sengupta. VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network. In SIGCOMM, 2009.

Digital Library

[10]

S. Ioannidis, A. D. Keromytis, S. M. Bellovin, and J. M. Smith. Implementing a distributed rewall. In CCS, 2000.

Digital Library

[11]

J. P. John, E. Katz-Bassett, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson, and A. Venkataramani. Consensus routing: The Internet as a distributed system. In NSDI, 2008.

Digital Library

[12]

N. P. Katta, J. Rexford, and D. Walker. Incremental consistent updates. In HotSDN, 2013.

Digital Library

[13]

P. Kazemian, G. Varghese, and N. McKeown. Header Space Analysis: Static Checking For Networks. In NSDI, 2012.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Khurshid, X. Zou, W. Zhou, M. Caesar, and P. Godfrey. VeriFlow: Verifying Network-Wide Invariants in Real Time. In NSDI, 2013.

Digital Library

[15]

T. Koponen, K. Amidon, P. Balland, M. Casado, A. Chanda, B. Fulton, I. Ganichev, J. Gross, N. Gude, P. Ingram, et al. Network virtualization in multi-tenant datacenters. In NSDI, 2014.

Digital Library

[16]

L. Lamport. Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Communications of the ACM, 21(7):558--565, 1978.

Digital Library

[17]

M Ciosi et al. Network functions virtualization. Technical report, ETSI, 2013. http://goo.gl/Q84Bxi.

[18]

R. Mahajan and R. Wattenhofer. On Consistent Updates in Software-Defined Networks. In HotNets, 2013.

Digital Library

[19]

C. Monsanto, J. Reich, N. Foster, J. Rexford, and D. Walker. Composing software defined networks. In NSDI, 2013.

Digital Library

[20]

M. Reitblatt, N. Foster, J. Rexford, C. Schlesinger, and D. Walker. Abstractions for network update. In SIGCOMM, 2012.

Digital Library

[21]

R. Sherwood, G. Gibb, K.-K. Yap, G. Appenzeller, M. Casado, N. McKeown, and G. Parulkar. Can the production network be the testbed? In OSDI, 2010.

Digital Library

[22]

M. Yu, J. Rexford, M. J. Freedman, and J. Wang. Scalable flow-based networking with DIFANE. In SIGCOMM, 2011.

Digital Library

[23]

M. Yu, Y. Yi, J. Rexford, and M. Chiang. Rethinking virtual network embedding: substrate support for path splitting and migration. CCR, 2008.

Digital Library

Cited By

Jain VYatri VKanchan Kapoor C(2019)Software defined networkingJournal of High Speed Networks10.3233/JHS-19060125:1(1-40)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/JHS-190601
Qu TGuo DShen YZhu XLuo LLiu Z(2019)Minimizing Traffic Migration During Network Update in IaaS DatacentersIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2016.262874012:4(577-589)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2016.2628740
Sukapuram RBarua G(2019)ProFlow: Proportional Per-Bidirectional-Flow Consistent UpdatesIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2019.291008916:2(675-689)Online publication date: Jun-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2019.2910089
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards correct network virtualization
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
2. Networks

Recommendations

Towards correct network virtualization
SIGCOMM'14

In SDN, the underlying infrastructure is usually abstracted for applications that can treat the network as a logical or virtual entity. Commonly, the ``mappings" between virtual abstractions and their actual physical implementations are not one-to-one, ...
COCONUT: Seamless Scale-out of Network Elements
EuroSys '17: Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Computer Systems

A key use of software-defined networking is to enable scale-out of network data plane elements. Naively scaling networking elements, however, can cause incorrect behavior. For example, we show that an IDS system which operates correctly as a single ...
Towards full virtualization of SDN infrastructure
Abstract
With the emerging multi-tenant virtual networks in the cloud data center and the network slicing in wide-area network, full virtualization of the hardware network infrastructure is required. In this work, we propose SVirt, a full virtualization ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

HotSDN '14: Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking

August 2014

252 pages

ISBN:9781450329897

DOI:10.1145/2620728

Program Chairs:
Aditya Akella
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
,
Albert Greenberg
Microsoft, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 44, Issue 4
SIGCOMM'14
October 2014
672 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2740070
Editors:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain
,
Katerina Argyraki
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Hitesh Ballani
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
,
Fabián Bustamante
Northwestern University, USA
,
Joseph Camp
SMU, USA
,
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University, USA
,
Phillipa Gill
Stony Brook University, USA
,
Marco Mellia
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
,
Bhaskaran Raman
IIT Bombay, India
,
Joel Sommers
Colgate University, USA
,
Aline Carneiro Viana
INRIA, France
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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].

Sponsors

SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 August 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

NSA

Conference

SIGCOMM'14

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

SIGCOMM'14: ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference

August 22, 2014

Illinois, Chicago, USA

Acceptance Rates

HotSDN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 114 submissions, 44%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

29
Total Citations
View Citations
1,769
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)68
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Jain VYatri VKanchan Kapoor C(2019)Software defined networkingJournal of High Speed Networks10.3233/JHS-19060125:1(1-40)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/JHS-190601
Qu TGuo DShen YZhu XLuo LLiu Z(2019)Minimizing Traffic Migration During Network Update in IaaS DatacentersIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2016.262874012:4(577-589)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2016.2628740
Sukapuram RBarua G(2019)ProFlow: Proportional Per-Bidirectional-Flow Consistent UpdatesIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2019.291008916:2(675-689)Online publication date: Jun-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2019.2910089
Davoli GEsposito FCerroni W(2019)A Network Management Protocol for Sonification of Software-Defined Infrastructures2019 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN47374.2019.9039998(1-7)Online publication date: Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/NFV-SDN47374.2019.9039998
Foerster KSchmid SVissicchio S(2019)Survey of Consistent Software-Defined Network UpdatesIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.287674921:2(1435-1461)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2018.2876749
Amiri SFoerster KJacob RParham MSchmid S(2018)Waypoint Routing in Special Networks2018 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops10.23919/IFIPNetworking.2018.8696560(1-9)Online publication date: May-2018
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking.2018.8696560
Ludwig ADudycz SRost MSchmid S(2018)Transiently Policy-Compliant Network UpdatesIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2018.287102326:6(2569-2582)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2018.2871023
Foerster KLudwig AMarcinkowski JSchmid S(2018)Loop-Free Route Updates for Software-Defined NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2017.277842626:1(328-341)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2017.2778426
Esposito FWang JContoli CDavoli GCerroni WCallegati F(2018)A Behavior-Driven Approach to Intent Specification for Software-Defined Infrastructure Management2018 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN.2018.8725754(1-6)Online publication date: Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/NFV-SDN.2018.8725754
Ghorbani SGodfrey P(2017)COCONUTProceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3064176.3064201(32-47)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3064176.3064201
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten