Controlling Race Conditions in OpenFlow to Accelerate Application Verification and Packet Forwarding

OpenFlow is a Software Defined Networking (SDN) protocol that is being deployed in critical network systems. SDN application verification takes an important role in guaranteeing the correctness of the application. Through our investigation, we discover that application verification can be very inefficient under the OpenFlow protocol since there are many race conditions between the data packets and control plane messages. Furthermore, these race conditions also increase the control plane workload and packet forwarding delay. We propose Attendre, an OpenFlow extension, to mitigate the ill effects of the race conditions in OpenFlow networks. We have implemented Attendre in NICE (a model checking verifier), Open vSwitch (a software virtual switch) and NOX (an OpenFlow control platform). Experiments show that Attendre can reduce verification time by several orders of magnitude, and can significantly reduce TCP connection setup time.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Engineering

Grantor

Rice University

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Sun, Xiaoye Steven

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ng, T. S. Eugene

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Knightly, Edward W
• Zhong, Lin

• OpenFlow
• Verification
• Forwarding Delay

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88170

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/88170