A Call To Arms for Tackling the Unexpected Implications of SDN Controller Enhancements

The last few years have seen a massive and organic transformation of the Software Defined Networking ecosystem with the development of enhancements, e.g., Statesman, ESPRES, PANE, and Athens, to provide better composability, better utilization of TCAM, consistent network updates, or congestion free updates. The end-result of this organic evolution is a disconnect between the SDN applications and the dataplane. A disconnect which can impact an SDN application's performance or correctness. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of the interactions between enhancements and SDN applications -- we show that an application's performance can be significantly impacted by these enhancements: with the efficiency of a traffic engineering App reduced by 24.8%. Motivated by these insights, we argue for a redesign of the SDN controller centered around mitigating and reducing the impact of these enhancements. We demonstrate through an initial prototype and with experiments that our abstractions require minimal changes and can restore an SDN application's performance and efficiency.

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