PhD proposal: Formal Representation and Application of Forwarding Table Entries in Software Defined Networking

Mathomatic computer algebra system by Jiri Brozovsky(CC BY 2.0)

Liang Yang is due to present his PhD proposal this coming Wednesday 2nd September 2015 from 11:00am-12:00pm in the Cotton Club (Cotton 350, Cotton Building, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Wellington).

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that decouples the network control and forwarding functions. In SDN, the functionality of static configuration and routing table in a traditional network has been replaced by forwarding table entry (FTE). There is already some initial research on the relation and interaction among different FTEs from the mathematical perspective. However, these research works have not been fully explored, especially in terms of the correlation across multiple tables in multiple nodes. Based on the existing analysis of FTE, a controller cannot have comprehensive understanding of network status and effective management of network resources. To address this challenge, a systematic approach is proposed to analyse and utilise FTE from a networking perspective. This approach reexamines the relation and manipulations among FTEs across multiple tables in multiple nodes and formalises them with the help of logical syntax and formal semantics. Moreover, this representation will be applied and evaluated in two real-world scenarios: to perform large-scale network traffic analysis and to optimise global FTE placement.