TY - GEN
T1 - COCONUT
T2 - 12th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2017
AU - Ghorbani, Soudeh
AU - Godfrey, P. Brighten
N1 - This work was supported by a VMware Graduate Fellowship, by NSF CNS Award #1513906, and by the Maryland Procurement Office under Contract No. H98230-14-C-0141.
PY - 2017/4/23
Y1 - 2017/4/23
N2 - A key use of software-defined networking is to enable scaleout of network data plane elements. Naively scaling networking elements, however, can cause incorrect behavior. For example, we show that an IDS system which operates correctly as a single network element can erroneously and permanently block hosts when it is replicated. In this paper, we provide a system, COCONUT, for seamless scale-out of network forwarding elements; that is, an SDN application programmer can program to what functionally appears to be a single forwarding element, but which may be replicated behind the scenes. To do this, we identify the key property for seamless scale out, weak causality, and guarantee it through a practical and scalable implementation of vector clocks in the data plane. We prove that COCONUT enables seamless scale out of networking elements, i.e., the user-perceived behavior of any COCONUT element implemented with a distributed set of concurrent replicas is provably indistinguishable from its singleton implementation. Finally, we build a prototype of COCONUT and experimentally demonstrate its correct behavior. We also show that its abstraction enables a more efficient implementation of seamless scale-out compared to a naive baseline.
AB - A key use of software-defined networking is to enable scaleout of network data plane elements. Naively scaling networking elements, however, can cause incorrect behavior. For example, we show that an IDS system which operates correctly as a single network element can erroneously and permanently block hosts when it is replicated. In this paper, we provide a system, COCONUT, for seamless scale-out of network forwarding elements; that is, an SDN application programmer can program to what functionally appears to be a single forwarding element, but which may be replicated behind the scenes. To do this, we identify the key property for seamless scale out, weak causality, and guarantee it through a practical and scalable implementation of vector clocks in the data plane. We prove that COCONUT enables seamless scale out of networking elements, i.e., the user-perceived behavior of any COCONUT element implemented with a distributed set of concurrent replicas is provably indistinguishable from its singleton implementation. Finally, we build a prototype of COCONUT and experimentally demonstrate its correct behavior. We also show that its abstraction enables a more efficient implementation of seamless scale-out compared to a naive baseline.
KW - Consistency
KW - Correctness
KW - Network functions
KW - One big switch
KW - One-to-many mapping
KW - Replication
KW - Software defined networking
KW - Virtualization
KW - Weak causal consistency
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019189612&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85019189612&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3064176.3064201
DO - 10.1145/3064176.3064201
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85019189612
T3 - Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2017
SP - 32
EP - 47
BT - Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2017
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 23 April 2017 through 26 April 2017
ER -