Policy transformation in software defined networks

Abstract

A Software Defined Network (SDN) enforces network-wide policies by installing packet-handling rules across a distributed collection of switches. Today's SDN platforms force programmers to decide how to decompose a high-level policy into the low-level rules in each switch. We argue that future SDN platforms should support automatic transformation of policies by moving, merging, or splitting rules across multiple switches. This would simplify programming by allowing programs written on one abstract switch to run over a more complex network topology, and simplify analysis by consolidating a policy spread over multiple switches into a single list of rules. This poster presents our ongoing work on a sound and complete set of axioms for policy transformation, to enable rewriting of rules across multiple switches while preserving the forwarding policy. These axioms are invaluable for creating and analyzing algorithms for optimizing the rewriting of rules.