Ravana

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) offers greater flexibility than traditional distributed architectures, at the risk of the controller being a single point-of-failure. Unfortunately, existing fault-tolerance techniques, such as replicated state machine, are insufficient to ensure correct network behavior under controller failures. The challenge is that, in addition to the application state of the controllers, the switches maintain hard state that must be handled consistently. Thus, it is necessary to incorporate switch state into the system model to correctly offer a "logically centralized" controller.