Traffic Management in Networks with Programmable Data Planes

AbstractThis brief includes a summary of the Ph.D. thesis entitled "Traffic management in networks with programmable data planes" and supervised by Prof. Antonio Capone. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables the configuration and operation of communications networks through open software programming interfaces providing an unprecedented flexibility in their dynamic reconfiguration and management. The thesis analyses the opportunities for traffic management provided by the SDN paradigm at different levels. Starting from the programmability at the control plane, we have designed a Traffic Engineering framework operating on the global view offered on top of the controller to proactively configure the network according to traffic measurements while limiting the number of reconfigurations. In order to deal with unexpected conditions such as network failures and congestion, the above centralized, global and proactive approach has been complemented by reactive and distributed approaches based on advanced stateful programmable data planes which enable a self-adaptation according to partial local information yielding to a more prompt and scalable reaction. All the solutions presented in the thesis have been evaluated with software prototypes based on research-oriented or production-ready open-source tools. Some of the extensions developed for these tools have been integrated as official open-source contributions