PROJECT TITLE :

Dynamic, Fine-Grained Data Plane Monitoring With Monocle - 2018

ABSTRACT:

Ensuring network reliability is important for satisfying service-level objectives. However, diagnosing network anomalies during a timely fashion is tough thanks to the complicated nature of network configurations. We gift Monocle - a system that uncovers forwarding problems due to hardware or software failures in switches, by verifying that the data plane corresponds to the view that an SDN controller installs via the control plane. Monocle works by systematically probing the switch information plane; the probes are constructed by formulating the switch forwarding table logic as a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) drawback. Our SAT formulation quickly generates probe packets targeting a particular rule considering both existing and new rules. Monocle will monitor not solely static flow tables (as is currently usually the case), however also dynamic networks with frequent flow table changes. Our evaluation shows that Monocle is capable of fine-grained monitoring for the bulk of rules, and it will determine a rule suddenly missing from the information plane or misbehaving during a matter of seconds. In fact, throughout our analysis Monocle uncovered problems with two hardware switches that we tend to were using in our analysis. Finally, during network updates Monocle helps controllers address switches that exhibit transient inconsistencies between their control and information plane states.