Renaissance: A Self-Stabilizing Distributed SDN Control Plane using In-band Communications

By introducing programmability, automated verification, and innovative debugging tools, Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) are poised to meet the increasingly stringent dependability requirements of today's communication networks. However, the design of fault-tolerant SDNs remains an open challenge. This paper considers the design of dependable SDNs through the lenses of self-stabilization - a very strong notion of fault-tolerance. In particular, we develop algorithms for an in-band and distributed control plane for SDNs, called Renaissance, which tolerate a wide range of failures. Our self-stabilizing algorithms ensure that after the occurrence of arbitrary failures, (i) every non-faulty SDN controller can reach any switch (or another controller) within a bounded communication delay (in the presence of a bounded number of failures) and (ii) every switch is managed by a controller. We evaluate Renaissance through a rigorous worst-case analysis as well as a prototype implementation (based on OVS and Floodlight, and Mininet).