SIGCOMM13: Participatory Networking: An API for Application Control of SDNs

The paper was presented by Andrew D. Ferguson

Other co-authors are: Arjun Guha, Chen Liang, Rodrigo Fonseca and Shriram Krishnamurthi.

This talk was about PANE, an API for applications to control SDN. With PANE, user can work with network to achieve better performance, security and predictive behaviours.

Features of Participatory Networking:

• End-user API for SDNs
• Exposes existing mechanisms
• No effect on unmodified applications

Challenges:

• how to decompose control and visibility of the network
• how to resolve conflicts between untrusted users and across requests, while maintaining baseline levels of fairness and security

Approaches to address the challenges:

• Decompose control and visibility:
• Define control and visibility as Share. Share contains 3 parts: flowgroup, principals, privileges
• Share could be decomposed to sub shares, and can form Share Tree (hierarchy of shares).
• Resolving conflicts:
• Policy tree: hierarchical flow table to resolve conflicts from leaves node to root node.
• The only requirement is: associative. No identity information is needed.

Implementation:

Evaluation:

The system is evaluated in a hadoop platform. In the test, there are 3 sort jobs: two low priority and one high priority. PANE can Speed up by 23% in high priority jobs. Also less than 30 rules coexist in the system.

Q: What about other resources like latency?

A: Will be considered in the future development. For example switch hops as indication of latency.

More details can be found: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p327.pdf