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SDN traceroute: tracing SDN forwarding without changing network behavior

Published: 22 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Software-defined networking provides flexibility in designing networks by allowing distributed network state to be managed by logically centralized control programs. However, this flexibility brings added complexity, which requires new debugging tools that can provide insights into network behavior. We propose a tool, SDN traceroute, that can query the current path taken by any packet through an SDN-enabled network. The path is traced by using the actual forwarding mechanisms at each SDN-enabled device without changing the forwarding rules being measured. This enables administrators to discover the forwarding behavior for arbitrary Ethernet packets, as well as debug problems in both switch and controller logic. Our prototype implementation requires only a few high-priority rules per device, runs on commodity hardware using only the required features of the OpenFlow 1.0 specification, and can generate traces in about one millisecond per hop.

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      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
      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: 22 August 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. datacenter
      2. network debugging
      3. network management
      4. software-defined networking
      5. traceroute

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      SIGCOMM'14
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      SIGCOMM'14: ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference
      August 22, 2014
      Illinois, Chicago, USA

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      HotSDN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 114 submissions, 44%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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      Cited By

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      • (2024)SD-MDN-TM: A traceback and mitigation integrated mechanism against DDoS attacks with IP spoofingComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110793(110793)Online publication date: Sep-2024
      • (2024)Graph neural network based robust anomaly detection at service level in SDN driven microservice systemComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2023.110135239:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2024
      • (2023)MARS: Fault Localization in Programmable Networking Systems with Low-cost In-Band Network TelemetryProceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3605573.3605622(347-357)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
      • (2023)MARS: Fault Localization in Programmable Networking Systems with Low-cost In-Band Network Telemetry2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS57198.2023.10188760(1-2)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
      • (2022)Innovative network monitoring techniques through in-band inter packet gap telemetry (IPGNET)Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on P4 in Europe10.1145/3565475.3569077(53-56)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2022
      • (2022)Towards Automatic Root Cause Diagnosis of Persistent Packet Loss in Cloud Overlay NetworkIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.313755730:3(1178-1192)Online publication date: Jun-2022
      • (2022)TopoTrust: A Blockchain-based Trustless and Secure Topology Discovery in SDNs2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9825045(1107-1112)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
      • (2022)Trust Enhanced Security for Routing in SDN2022 1st International Conference on 6G Networking (6GNet)10.1109/6GNet54646.2022.9830213(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
      • (2022)GwPFV: A novel packet forwarding verification mechanism based on gateways in SDN-based storage environmentJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2022.10335471(103354)Online publication date: Dec-2022
      • (2022)A Network Forensics Investigating Method Based on Weak Consistency for Distributed SDNUbiquitous Security10.1007/978-981-19-0468-4_18(241-254)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2022
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