Towards dynamic network policy composition and conflict resolution in software defined networking

Software defined networking (SDN) decouples traffic forwarding from network control logic, offering real-time network programmability and innovative service provisioning. Given the continued growth in available SDN applications, individual management of several network services poses scalability challenges and is no longer a viable option. Manually created policy constructs, especially in the presence of multiple application and services may overlap or conflict with each other leading to sub-optimal network operation. The present paper proposes an automated policy creation and validation framework employing user traffic profiling to dynamically capture a basic set of application “network intents”. A policy broker utility is designed to allow further customization of the derived network intents, translated to valid action statements that are dynamically implemented in the network. The profiling scheme and policy broker is tested in two different campus environments, resulting in automated policy creation and conflict resolution for each scenario with relatively low operational latency.