SAIDE: Efficient application interference detection and elimination in SDN

Abstract The ease of programmability in Software-Defined Networking has greatly facilitated SDN application development and deployment. Applications run simultaneously in the controller and generate policies to serve the network together. However, multiple applications may cause unintentionally harmful interferences even if each SDN application is properly programmed. Unfortunately, the existing SDN verification and test work have no consideration of application interferences. To solve this problem, we develop the mathematical models for applications and policies and elaborate the relationships of policies based on computational geometry. The application interference is formally defined according to policy conflict. To this end, we propose an efficient SDN Application Interference Detection and Elimination (SAIDE) scheme. Firstly, on the basis of designed policy refactor, we encode the matching fields of policies as bit vectors and design bit vectors AND operation to analyze the policy relationships. Then, we combine the action and refactor fields of policies to detect the application interferences (direct and indirect interferences). Finally, with multi-criteria decision making, we assign priorities to conflicting policies to eliminate the corresponding application interferences. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of SAIDE through a proof-of-concept prototype. Simulation results show that the SAIDE can effectively detect the application interferences with 98% accuracy at least and has reduced the detection time by 23.9% compared to the state-of-the-art work.