SNAP: Stateful network-wide abstractions for packet processing

Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Yaron Koral, Michael Greenberg, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

148 Scopus citations

Abstract

Early programming languages for software-defined networking (SDN) were built on top of the simple match-action paradigm offered by OpenFlow 1.0. However, emerging hardware and software switches offer much more sophisticated support for persistent state in the data plane, without involving a central controller. Nevertheless, managing stateful, distributed systems efficiently and correctly is known to be one of the most challenging programming problems. To simplify this new SDN problem, we introduce SNAP. SNAP offers a simpler "centralized" stateful programming model, by allowing programmers to develop programs on top of one big switch rather than many. These programs may contain reads and writes to global, persistent arrays, and as a result, programmers can implement a broad range of applications, from stateful firewalls to fine-grained traffic monitoring. The SNAP compiler relieves programmers of having to worry about how to distribute, place, and optimize access to these stateful arrays by doing it all for them. More specifically, the compiler discovers read/write dependencies between arrays and translates one-big-switch programs into an efficient internal representation based on a novel variant of binary decision diagrams. This internal representation is used to construct a mixed-integer linear program, which jointly optimizes the placement of state and the routing of traffic across the underlying physical topology. We have implemented a prototype compiler and applied it to about 20 SNAP programs over various topologies to demonstrate our techniques' scalability.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication
Pages29-43
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341936
DOIs
StatePublished - 22 Aug 2016
Event2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016 - Florianopolis, Brazil
Duration: 22 Aug 201626 Aug 2016

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Conference

Conference2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityFlorianopolis
Period22/08/1626/08/16

Keywords

  • Network programming language
  • One big switch
  • Optimization
  • SNAP
  • Software defined networks
  • Stateful packet processing

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