Software Defined Networks and Gossip Protocols

The performance of data-center applications are critically dependent on the underlying network. However, given the complexities associated with management, networks today typically provide little more than best-effort packet deliv-ery between hosts. The emergence of software-defined net-working (SDN) has created an opportunity to build more dy-namic networks that can be tailored precisely to the needs of applications. Unfortunately, existing solutions for monitor-ing within SDNs suffer from several short-comings. Either they are inaccurate (due to eventual consistency of archi-tecture [5]), imprecise (due to limitations of current hard-ware [5]), or too costly to be practical at scale (due to re-liance on switch forwarding rules and centralization [1]). We argue that gossip protocols offer an ideal alternative for SDN monitoring, due to their scalability and resiliency