Position Paper: Reactive Logic in Software-Defined Networking: Accounting for the Limitations of the Switches

SDN provides an abstract view of the network in which the switches expose a homogeneous set of capabilities. Unfortunately, the abstraction process may hide important information about the devices that finally impacts on the network operations. Although SDN implementations, like OpenFlow, already account for some device specific properties, we believe that other important ones have been so far overlooked. To this regard, we focus on the switches' performance at handling control messages and on how this may affect the control plane design. To support our discussion, we provide theoretical examples and simulation-based experiments. We conclude that accounting for switches performance at handling control messages is a crucial step in the design of advanced SDN control plane features.