Abstract
The software-defined networking paradigm introduces interesting opportunities to operate networks in a more flexible yet formally verifiable manner. Despite the logically centralized control, however, a Software-Defined Network (SDN) is still a distributed system, with inherent delays between the switches and the controller. Especially the problem of changing network configurations in a consistent manner, also known as the consistent network update problem, has received much attention over the last years. This paper revisits the problem of how to update an SDN in a transiently consistent, loop-free manner. First, we rigorously prove that computing a maximum (“greedy”) loop-free network update is generally NP-hard; this result has implications for the classic maximum acyclic subgraph problem (the dual feedback arc set problem) as well. Second, we show that for special problem instances, fast and good approximation algorithms exist.
The research of Saeed Akhoondian Amiri has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC consolidator grant DISTRUCT, agreement No. 648527). The research of Arne Ludwig and Stefan Schmid was supported by the EU project UNIFY.
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Notes
- 1.
It is known however that in the worst case, a greedy approach can lead to an unnecessarily large number of rounds [15].
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Amiri, S.A., Ludwig, A., Marcinkowski, J., Schmid, S. (2016). Transiently Consistent SDN Updates: Being Greedy is Hard. In: Suomela, J. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9988. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48314-6_25
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