Transiently Consistent SDN Updates: Being Greedy is Hard

Transiently Consistent SDN Updates: Being Greedy is Hard

Abstract

The software-defined networking paradigm introduces interesting opportunities to operate networks in a more flexible yet formally verifiable manner. Despite the logically centralized control, however, a Software-Defined Network (SDN) is still a distributed system, with inherent delays between the switches and the controller. Especially the problem of changing network configurations in a consistent manner, also known as the consistent network update problem, has received much attention over the last years. This paper revisits the problem of how to update an SDN in a transiently consistent, loop-free manner. First, we rigorously prove that computing a maximum (“greedy”) loop-free network update is generally NP-hard; this result has implications for the classic maximum acyclic subgraph problem (the dual feedback arc set problem) as well. Second, we show that for special problem instances, fast and good approximation algorithms exist.

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Authors
  • Amiri, Saeed Akhoondian
  • Ludwig, Arne
  • Marcinkowski, Jan
  • Schmid, Stefan
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
23rd International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Informatik Allgemeines
Event Location
Helsinki, Finland
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
July 2016
Date
2016
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