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HotSwap: correct and efficient controller upgrades for software-defined networks

Published: 16 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Like any complex software, SDN programs must be updated periodically, whether to migrate to a new controller platform, repair bugs, or address performance issues. Nowadays, SDN operators typically perform such upgrades by stopping the old controller and starting the new one---an approach that wipes out all installed flow table entries and causes substantial disruption including losing packets, increasing latency, and even compromising correctness.
This paper presents HotSwap, a system for upgrading SDN controllers in a disruption-free and correct manner. HotSwap is a hypervisor (sitting between the switches and the controller) that maintains a history of network events. To upgrade from an old controller to a new one, HotSwap bootstraps the new controller (by replaying the history) and monitors its output (to determine which parts of the network state may be reused with the new controller). To ensure good performance, HotSwap filters the history using queries specified by programmers. We describe our design and preliminary implementation of HotSwap, and present experimental results demonstrating its effectiveness for managing upgrades to third-party controller programs.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HotSDN '13: Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
August 2013
182 pages
ISBN:9781450321785
DOI:10.1145/2491185
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 ACM 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: 16 August 2013

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Author Tags

  1. controller upgrade
  2. dynamic software updating
  3. software-defined network

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  • Research-article

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SIGCOMM'13
Sponsor:
SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference
August 16, 2013
Hong Kong, China

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HotSDN '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 84 submissions, 45%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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  • (2024)Collaborative computation offloading for scheduling emergency tasks in SDN-based mobile edge computing networksComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2023.110101238(110101)Online publication date: Jan-2024
  • (2023)Independent tasks scheduling of collaborative computation offloading for SDN-powered MEC on 6G networksSoft Computing10.1007/s00500-023-08091-227:14(9593-9617)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Integrity, Resilience and Security of 5G Transport Networks Based on SDN/NFV TechnologiesDistributed Computer and Communication Networks10.1007/978-3-030-97110-6_9(123-135)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Secure Software-Defined Networking Communication Systems for Smart Cities: Current Status, Challenges, and TrendsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30479969(12083-12113)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2019)Mitigating Load Imbalance in Distributed Data Serving with Rack-Scale Memory PoolingACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/330998636:2(1-37)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2019
  • (2019)A Precise and Expressive Lattice-theoretical Framework for Efficient Network Verification2019 IEEE 27th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP.2019.8888144(1-12)Online publication date: Oct-2019
  • (2019)Survey of Consistent Software-Defined Network UpdatesIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.287674921:2(1435-1461)Online publication date: Oct-2020
  • (2019)A Review of Software-Defined WLANs: Architectures and Central Control MechanismsIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.286869221:1(431-463)Online publication date: Sep-2020
  • (2019)Modeling and verifying the topology discovery mechanism of OpenFlow controllers in software-defined networks using process algebraScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2019.102343(102343)Online publication date: Nov-2019
  • (2018)NetCP: Consistent, Non-Interruptive and Efficient Checkpointing and Rollback of SDN2018 IEEE/ACM 26th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS.2018.8624142(1-10)Online publication date: Jun-2018
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