A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management

Abstract

Today's data networks are surprisingly fragile and difficult to manage. We argue that the root of these problems lies in the complexity of the control and management planes-the software and protocols coordinating network elements-and particularly the way the decision logic and the distributed-systems issues are inexorably intertwined. We advocate a complete refactoring of the functionality and propose three key principles-network-level objectives, network-wide views, and direct control-that we believe should underlie a new architecture. Following these principles, we identify an extreme design point that we call "4D," after the architecture's four planes: decision, dissemination, discovery, and data. The 4D architecture completely separates an AS's decision logic from protocols that govern the interaction among network elements. The AS-level objectives are specified in the decision plane, and enforced through direct configuration of the state that drives how the data plane forwards packets. In the 4D architecture, the routers and switches simply forward packets at the behest of the decision plane, and collect measurement data to aid the decision plane in controlling the network. Although 4D would involve substantial changes to today's control and management planes, the format of data packets does not need to change; this eases the deployment path for the 4D architecture, while still enabling substantial innovation in network control and management. We hope that exploring an extreme design point will help focus the attention of the research and industrial communities on this crucially important and intellectually challenging area.

100-Year History and Future of Network System Technologies in Japan

“…SDN is a technique for separating the control plane from the forwarding plane; this effectively removes the routing function from the node and assigns it to the SDN controller [74]- [77]. The SDN controller employs a general server to run routing software that performs packet forwarding on the path by determining the path, controlling the node device, and setting the forwarding table (Fig.…”

An Overview of Software Defined Campus Networks

“…4D protocol proposed by Greenberg, decomposes the functions of network control into four planes (Greenberg et al, 2005).  A decision plane that is responsible for creating a network configuration  A dissemination plane that gathers information about network state to decision plane and distributes decision plane output to routers.…”

Coordinated sampling sans Origin-Destination identifiers: Algorithms and analysis

“…First, centralization is viable if the configurations are generated reasonably quickly (within 5-10 minutes). Recent trends show that ISPs favor centralized management [22,23] and that routing and traffic information are already available [24,25]. 3 Second, the hash functions required for flow sampling are simple and amenable to fast hardware implementations [20,26].…”