FICUS: Fast Incremental Consistent Update in SDN based on relation graph

In Software Defined Networking (SDN), the configuration inconsistency during updates is one main source of network instability. An efficient updating scheme with configuration consistency is required. In this paper, we propose the scheme of Fast Incremental Consistent Update for SDN (FICUS) based on the relation graph (RG). In our scheme, we analyse the relation between update operations, construct the relation graph and find a proper order of these update operations to avoid inconsistency. To solve the problem, we define two types of relations: the path dependency relation and the path rejection relation. We evaluate our scheme and algorithms by comprehensive experiments. The results show that our scheme needs only 10%-40% of the rules compared with the two-phase update scheme and speeds up the update process by 40% in average.