In-Band Update for Network Routing Policy Migration

Abstract

Network operators often need to change their routing policy in response to network failures, new load balancing strategies, or stricter security requirements. While several recent works have aimed at solving this problem, they all assume that a fast and conveniently dimensioned out-of band network is available to communicate with any device. Unfortunately, such a parallel network is often not practical. This paper presents a technique for performing such updates in-band: it enables reconfiguration control messages to be sent directly within the fast production network. Performing such updates is hard because intermediate configurations can lock out the controller from devices before they are updated. Thus, updates have to be carefully sequenced. Our technique also minimizes the total update time by updating the network in parallel, whenever possible. Our technique takes into account in-band middle boxes, such as firewalls. We have implemented our framework using Integer Linear Programming, and experimentally validated it on problems of realistic scale.