Network topology scale and the demand for network services increased throughout the years. This trend increases the complexity of performing network maintenance and configuration tasks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach to computer networking that provides simple network management by the abstraction of higher level functionality.
SDN introduces challenges in terms of consistency and scalability. Updates are executed over the network frequently and should be performed consistently while minimizing the overhead. Moreover, as the network size increases, the need for network update procedures that allow scalability arises. We introduce a time-triggered approach to performing network updates. We demonstrate that our update approach provides lower overhead, shorter update duration, and improved scalability, all without compromising consistency.
After introducing the timed consistent network updates approach and demonstrating that time is a powerful abstraction for coordinating network updates, we present a time-based tag-free (TBTF) approach that allows to perform consistent network updates without using version tags.
Time-based updates provide high certainty about an update’s execution time. Therefore, we can schedule update procedures with a different order of phases than untimed approaches allow. TBTF enables us to facilitate this advantage. The result is an update procedure that does not require duplicate sets of rules. Old rules can be deleted immediately once their replacement is enabled.