AHI: Efficient policy space set operations

With the fast industrial deployment of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, network function policy enforcement in large scale virtualized networks becomes a key challenge for network management. Distributed policy enforcement heavily involves network policy space analysis, where set operations consume most of the computation. Based on spatial projection and bitmap indexing, a novel algorithm AHI (Atomic Hyper-Rectangle Indexing) is proposed for fast policy space set operations. Experiments with real datasets demonstrated that AHI improves set operation speed by two to three orders of magnitude and achieves the same least space cost, comparing to existing state-of-the-art algorithms r-BDD, wildcard expression, and PSA.