Consistent Updates for Packet Classifiers

We present a methodology for constructing a consistent sequence of updates to be applied incrementally to packet classifiers when the updates arrive in a cluster, where consistency is with respect to the next hop/action returned from a packet forwarding table/classifier during lookup. The sequence of updates, built using our strategy, is free from redundancies in update operations and produces a near minimal increase in table size. We prove the existence of a consistent update sequence for any given rule table and a cluster of updates. Our experiments validate our methodology and demonstrate a minimal increase in intermediate table size as a cluster of updates is applied.