OpenFlow Rules Interactions: Definition and Detection

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising architecture for computer networks that allows the development of complex and revolutionary applications, without breaking the backward compatibility with legacy networks. Programmability of the control-plane is one of the most interesting features of SDN, since it provides a higher degree of flexibility in network management: network operations are driven by ad-hoc written programs that substitute the classical combination of firewalls, routers and switches configurations performed in traditional networks. A successful SDN implementation is provided by the OpenFlow standard, that defines a rule-based programming model for the network. The development process of OpenFlow applications is currently a low-level, error prone programming exercise, mainly performed manually in both the implementation and verification phases. In this paper we provide a first formal classification of OpenFlow rules interactions into a single OpenFlow switch, and an algorithm to detect such interactions in order to aid the OpenFlow applications development. Moreover, we briefly present a performance evaluation of our prototype and how it has been used in a real-word application.