Safe Reconfiguring Data Plane via Supervision over Resource and Flow States

In the Software-defined networking (SDN), when multiple control domains are used in control services, the transient state problem can occur causing the service flow interruption when border switches are updated asynchronously. We analyze the uniqueness of this problem for SDN, and propose a light-weight protocol for safe reconfiguration of the border switches in order to improve the availability of the services running in SDN. Our solution is designed as a generic supervision layer added in the control plane to support different types of services. To demonstrate the benefits, we implement a prototype of Information-centric networks (ICN) with the protocol, and conduct experiments using PlanetLab. The results show the ICN service can continuously serve high volume requests for contents despite the congestions built by the heavy background traffic. The performance gains in terms of the mean and standard deviation of the content retrieve delay are 40.5% and 21.56%.