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Towards transforming OpenFlow rulesets to fit fixed-function pipelines

Abstract
OpenFlow feature support differs between devices due to devicespecific hardware constraints. OpenFlow places the burden of addressing these differences on the controller, which increases development cost and restricts device interoperability. This paper investigates reducing this burden by algorithmically transforming an existing ruleset to fit an incompatible fixed-function pipeline to improve device interoperability. Existing rule-fitting schemes in the literature require metadata to link rules between tables into a path through the pipeline, but not all pipelines support metadata. We developed a novel approach that does not rely on any particular pipeline features, like metadata, and considers the pipeline's constraints, including both the matches and actions available. This paper presents our implementation, including ruleset preprocessing techniques, methods of transforming rules, and how we use a partially constrained boolean satisfiability problem to select from these transformations and build the final ruleset. While future work remains towards real-world deployment, our approach demonstrates fitting rulesets to fixed-function pipelines without metadata is feasible, and our techniques to reduce the size of the problem are beneficial.
Type
Conference Contribution
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Sanger, R., Luckie, M. J., & Nelson, R. (2020). Towards transforming OpenFlow rulesets to fit fixed-function pipelines. In Proceedings of 2020 Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR 2020) (pp. 123–134). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373360.3380844
Date
2020
Publisher
ACM
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
This is an author’s accepted version of an article published in the Proceedings of 2020 Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR 2020). © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery.