Abstractions for Network Update

Configuration changes are a common source of instability in net-works, leading to outages, performance disruptions, and security vulnerabilities. Even when the initial and final configurations are correct, the update process itself often steps through intermediate configurations that exhibit incorrect behaviors. This paper intro-duces the notion of consistent network updates—updates that are guaranteed to preserve well-defined behaviors when transitioning between configurations. We identify two distinct consistency lev-els, per-packet and per-flow, and we present general mechanisms for implementing them in Software-Defined Networks using switch APIs like OpenFlow. We develop a formal model of OpenFlow net-works, and prove that consistent updates preserve a large class of properties. We describe our prototype implementation, including several optimizations that reduce the overhead required to perform consistent updates. We present a verification tool that leverages consistent updates to significantly reduce the complexity of check-ing the correctness of network control software. Finally, we de-scribe the results of some simple experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of these optimizations on example applications