NetRevert: rollback recovery in SDN

Abstract

Recognizing the inevitability of human error and hardware failures, which can significantly hamper the computer system performance, the capability of checkpointing and rollback recovery has been proposed and widely used in servers and distributed systems. These facilities allow fast recovery from failures, software bugs, and misconfigurations. Though promising, they are rarely, if ever, provided for networking systems, thus the network operators still rely on ad-hoc and error-prone processes to recover from errors. In this work, we propose a checkpoint and rollback-recovery system for Software-Define Networking (SDN) systems, exploiting SDN's simple abstraction, network-wide view, and direct control properties. We propose an approach to efficiently identify the network-wide consistent states for rollback while preserving correctness.