Networking

A Practical System for Centralized Network Control

Hong Yan

CMU-CS-10-149 Nov 2010

Computer Science Department School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Thesis Committee: Hui Zhang, Chair David Andersen Srinivasan Seshan David A. Maltz, Microsoft Research T. S. Eugene Ng, Rice University

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Copyright c 2010 Hong Yan

This research was sponsored by the NSF under ITR Awards ANI-0085920, ANI-0331653, and NeTS Grant CNS-0520187. Views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of Microsoft, NSF, or the U.S. government.

Keywords: Centralized Network Control, Clean-slate Network Design, Network Dissemination Plane, Network Management

Abstract IP networking is a spectacular success, catalyzing the diffusion of data networking across academic institutions, governments, businesses, and homes worldwide. Yet, despite the fundamental importance of this infrastructure, today’s networks are surprisingly fragile and increasingly difficult to configure, control, and maintain. As our dependence on data networking grows, so do the risks of security breaches, large-scale outages, and service disruptions. We believe 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. The research community advocates a complete refactoring of the functionality and proposes a new architecture which they call “4D,” after the architecture’s four planes: decision, dissemination, discovery, and data. The 4D architecture pulls decision-making logic out of the network elements to create a logically centralized decision plane, where network-level...