Validation of Distributed SDN Control Plane Under Uncertain Failures

The design of distributed control plane is an essential part of SDN. While there is an urgent need for verifying the control plane, little, however, is known about how to validate that the control plane offers assurable performance, especially across various failures. Such validation is hard due to two fundamental challenges. First, the number of potential failure scenarios could be exponential or even non-enumerable. Second, it is still an open problem to model the performance change when the control plane employs different failure recovery strategies. In this paper, we first characterize the validation of the distributed control plane as a robust optimization problem and further propose a robust validation framework to verify whether a control plane provides assurable performance across various failure scenarios and multiple failure recovery strategies. Then, we prove that identifying an optimal recovery strategy is NP-hard after developing an optimization model of failure recovery. Accordingly, we design two efficient failure recovery strategies, which can well approximate the optimal strategy and further exhibit good performance against potential failures. Furthermore, we design the capacity augmentation scheme when the control plane fails to accommodate the worst failure scenario even with the optimal failure recovery strategy. We have conducted extensive evaluations based on an SDN test bed and large-scale simulations over real network topologies. The evaluation results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed validation framework.