SDN-enabled Rule Verification on Data Plane

Abstract

Network issues on data plane manifest themselves as failed rules, which can be verified by the comparison between actual and desired network behavior. Previous efforts implement this leveraging end-to-end active probing, which falls short on timely locating the exact failure points and identifying responsible rules. With the help of the out-band channel in softwaredefined network (SDN), per hop active probing can be employed to perform per device or even per rule network behavior comparison. Therefore, we present SERVE, an SDN-enabled rule verification framework that automatically identifies data plane network issues with periodic per rule network behavior comparison. By modeling network devices as multi-rooted trees with respect to pipeline processing, probes can be generated from a per device perspective in a timely manner. We evaluate the performance of SERVE and validate its effectiveness and timeliness on a small deployment with typical use cases.