State abstraction and management in software-defined networks

Abstract

SDN-enabled networks offer a great degree of flexibility, programmability and support for multiple applications. Applications running on top of a SDN controller could further benefit if network state information were made available to them as part of the SDN framework. Our work investigates the requirements for abstracting network state on the control plane. We intend to show that, by meeting these pre-requisites, network state can be made available with the guarantee of state safety and integrity. We envision that our state management abstraction will provide safety in the data plane and aid better programmability in the control plane.