The Case for Making Tight Control Plane Latency Guarantees in SDN Switches

Abstract

SDN controllers demand tight performance guarantees over the control plane actions performed by SDN switches. For example, traffic engineering techniques that frequently reconfigure the network require guarantees on the speed of gathering data from the network and the speed of reconfiguring the network. Yet, modern switches provide no guarantees for these control plane actions, e.g., inserting rules or gathering statistics. In fact, initial experiments demonstrate that unpredictability in control plane actions, specifically rule insertion, can inflate application completion times by a factor of 4X! In this paper, we present Mercury, a framework that offers a novel method for efficiently and practically managing switch TCAM to enable strict performance guarantees. Specifically, Mercury builds on the fundamental properties of TCAMs and provides guarantees by trading-off a nominal amount of TCAM space for assured performance. Our preliminary evaluations show that with less than 10% overheads, Mercury provides guarantees of 10ms insertion time and improves application performance by a factor 2X to 5X.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=3050237&type=pdf

• https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3050237,

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3050220.3050237,

https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3050220.3050237,

https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/sosr/sosr2017.html#ChenB17,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2606027679

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3050220.3050237,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3050220.3050237 under the license http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background