research-article

Public Access

When Raft Meets SDN: How to Elect a Leader and Reach Consensus in an Unruly Network

Authors:

Zhi-Li ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

APNet '17: Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

Pages 1 - 7

https://doi.org/10.1145/3106989.3106999

Published: 03 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In SDN, the logically centralized control plane ("network OS") is often realized via multiple SDN controllers for scalability and reliability. ONOS is such an example, where it employs Raft -- a new consensus protocol developed recently -- for state replication and consistency among the distributed SDN controllers. The reliance of network OS on consensus protocols to maintain consistent network state introduces an intricate inter-dependency between the network OS and the network under its control, thereby creating new kinds of fault scenarios or instabilities. In this paper, we use Raft to illustrate the problems that this inter-dependency may introduce in the design of distributed SDN controllers and discuss possible solutions to circumvent these issues.

References

[1]

A. Akella and A. Krishnamurthy. A highly available software defined fabric. In Proc. HotNets, 2014.

Digital Library

[2]

P. Berde et al. ONOS: Towards an Open, Distributed SDN OS. In Proc. HotSDN, 2014.

Digital Library

[3]

E. A. Brewer. Towards robust distributed systems. 2000.

[4]

M. Burrows. The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-coupled Distributed Systems. In Proc. OSDI, 2006.

Digital Library

[5]

T. D. Chandra, R. Griesemer, and J. Redstone. Paxos Made Live: an Engineering Perspective. In Proc. PODC, 2007.

Digital Library

[6]

B. Chandrasekaran and T. Benson. Tolerating sdn application failures with legosdn. In Proc. HotNets, 2014.

Digital Library

[7]

S. Gilbert and N. Lynch. Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services. SIGACT News, 2002.

Digital Library

[8]

D. Inc. Docker Containerization Platform. https://www.docker.com/, 2016.

[9]

S. Jain et al. B4: Experience with a Globally-deployed Software Defined WAN. Proc. SIGCOMM CCR, 2013.

Digital Library

[10]

N. Katta, H. Zhang, M. Freedman, and J. Rexford. Ravana: Controller fault-tolerance in software-defined networking. In Proc. SOSR, 2015.

Digital Library

[11]

T. D. Kimura. Hyperflow: A uniform visual language for different levels of programming. In Proc. CSC, 1993.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Koponen, M. Casado, N. Gude, J. Stribling, L. Poutievski, M. Zhu, R. Ramanathan, Y. Iwata, H. Inoue, T. Hama, and S. Shenker. Onix: A distributed control platform for large-scale production networks. In Proc. OSDI, 2010.

Digital Library

[13]

A. Lakshman and P. Malik. Cassandra: a Decentralized Structured Storage System. SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2010.

Digital Library

[14]

L. Lamport. The Part-time Parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1998.

Digital Library

[15]

L. Lamport. Paxos Made Simple. ACM SIGACT News, 2001.

[16]

N. McKeown et al. OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks. SIGCOMM CCR, 2008.

Digital Library

[17]

J. Medved et al. Opendaylight: Towards a Model-driven SDN Controller Architecture. In Proc. WoWMoM, 2014.

[18]

A. S. Muqaddas, A. Bianco, and P. Giaccone. Inter-controller traffic in onos clusters for sdn networks. 2016.

[19]

D. Ongaro. Logcabin: A distributed storage using raft. https://github.com/logcabin, 2016.

[20]

D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout. In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm. In Proc. USENIX ATC, 2014.

Digital Library

[21]

A. Panda, C. Scott, A. Ghodsi, T. Koponen, and S. Shenker. Cap for networks. 2013.

Digital Library

[22]

J.-F. Paris and D. D. E. Long. Pirogue, a lighter dynamic version of the raft distributed consensus algorithm. In Proc. IPCCC, 2015.

Digital Library

[23]

B. Pfaff, J. Pettit, T. Koponen, E. Jackson, A. Zhou, J. Rajahalme, J. Gross, A. Wang, J. Stringer, P. Shelar, K. Amidon, and M. Casado. The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch. In Proc. NSDI, 2015.

Digital Library

[24]

E. Ramadan, H. Mekky, B. Dumba, and Z.-L. Zhang. Adaptive resilient routing via preorders in sdn. In Proc. DCC, 2016.

Digital Library

[25]

E. Ramadan, H. Mekky, C. Jin, B. Dumba, and Z.-L. Zhang. Provably resilient network fabric with bounded latency. In Under Submission, 2017.

[26]

L. Schiff, S. Schmid, and M. Canini. Ground Control to Major Faults: Towards a Fault Tolerant and Adaptive SDN Control Network. In Proc. DSN-W on IFIP, 2016.

[27]

L. Schiff, S. Schmid, and P. Kuznetsov. In-band synchronization for distributed sdn control planes. SIGCOMM CCR, 2016.

Digital Library

[28]

P. Sun, R. Mahajan, J. Rexford, L. Yuan, M. Zhang, and A. Arefin. A network-state management service. In Proc. SIGCOMM, 2014.

Digital Library

[29]

K. C. Webb, B. C. Vattikonda, K. Yocum, and A. C. Snoeren. Scalable coordination of a tightly-coupled service in the wide area. In Proc. SOSP TRIOS, 2013.

Digital Library

Cited By

Guo ZLi CLi YDou SZhang BWu W(2024)Maintaining the Network Performance of Software-Defined WANs With Efficient Critical RoutingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333540421:2(2240-2252)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335404
Seo MKim JYou MShin SKim J(2024)gShock: A GNN-Based Fingerprinting System for Permissioned Blockchain Networks Over Encrypted ChannelsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.346958312(146328-146342)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3469583
Choumas KKorakis T(2023)When Machine Learning Meets Raft: How to Elect a Leader over a NetworkGLOBECOM 2023 - 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437805(3705-3710)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437805
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

When Raft Meets SDN: How to Elect a Leader and Reach Consensus in an Unruly Network
1. Networks
  1. Network algorithms
    1. Control path algorithms
      1. Network control algorithms
  2. Network protocols
    1. Network layer protocols
      1. Routing protocols
    2. Network protocol design

Recommendations

Network-Assisted Raft Consensus Algorithm
SIGCOMM Posters and Demos '17: Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Posters and Demos

Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. In this poster, we ask the following question: can we partially offload the execution of a consensus algorithm to the network to improve its performance? We argue for an affirmative answer by ...
Performance Analysis of SDN/OpenFlow Controllers: POX Versus Floodlight

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that is adaptable, dynamic, cost-effective, and manageable. The SDN architecture is a form of network virtualization where the network controlling functions and forwarding functions ...
Performance Analysis of POX and Ryu with Different SDN Topologies
ICISS '18: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Science and Systems

This paper deals with the performance comparison of two python-based Software Defined Network (SDN) controllers i.e. POX and Ryu under different network topologies such as Single, Linear, Tree, Dumbbell, Data Center Networks (DCN) and Software-Defined ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

APNet '17: Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

August 2017

127 pages

ISBN:9781450352444

DOI:10.1145/3106989

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 August 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

DoD ARO MURI Award
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
NSF grants

Conference

APNet'17

APNet'17: First Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

August 3 - 4, 2017

Hong Kong, China

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 50 of 118 submissions, 42%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
749
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)123
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 14 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Guo ZLi CLi YDou SZhang BWu W(2024)Maintaining the Network Performance of Software-Defined WANs With Efficient Critical RoutingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333540421:2(2240-2252)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335404
Seo MKim JYou MShin SKim J(2024)gShock: A GNN-Based Fingerprinting System for Permissioned Blockchain Networks Over Encrypted ChannelsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.346958312(146328-146342)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3469583
Choumas KKorakis T(2023)When Machine Learning Meets Raft: How to Elect a Leader over a NetworkGLOBECOM 2023 - 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437805(3705-3710)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM54140.2023.10437805
Seo MKim JMarin EYou MPark TLee SShin SKim J(2022)Heimdallr: Fingerprinting SD-WAN Control-Plane Architecture via Encrypted Control TrafficProceedings of the 38th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3564625.3564642(949-963)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3564625.3564642
Mendoza JFrias LAustria IFestin COcampo R(2022)SDNaaS: Software-Defined Networking as an IXP Service2022 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN56302.2022.9974910(59-65)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/NFV-SDN56302.2022.9974910
Zou RLiu YZang QWei BLiu CHou JZhou YChe J(2022)Research and Development of Cyber Cyberspace Resilience Technology2022 International Conference on Information Technology, Communication Ecosystem and Management (ITCEM)10.1109/ITCEM57303.2022.00014(23-28)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ITCEM57303.2022.00014
Jiang SYang LCheng GGao XFeng TZhou Y(2022)A quantitative framework for network resilience evaluation using Dynamic Bayesian NetworkComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2022.07.042194(387-398)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2022.07.042
Wang YChai YZhang Q(2022)WALOR: Workload-Driven Adaptive Layout Optimization of Raft Groups for Heterogeneous Distributed Key-Value StoresNetwork and Parallel Computing10.1007/978-3-031-21395-3_27(290-301)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-21395-3_27
Guo ZDou SWang YLiu SFeng WXu Y(2021)HybridFlow: Achieving Load Balancing in Software-Defined WANs With Scalable RoutingIEEE Transactions on Communications10.1109/TCOMM.2021.307450069:8(5255-5268)Online publication date: Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3074500
Espinel Sarmiento DLebre ANussbaum LChari A(2021)Decentralized SDN Control Plane for a Distributed Cloud-Edge Infrastructure: A SurveyIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2021.305029723:1(256-281)Online publication date: Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2021.3050297
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents