Congestion-Minimizing Network Update in Data Centers

The SDN control plane needs to frequently update the data plane as the network conditions change. Since each switch updates its flow table independently and asynchronously, the transition of data plane state—if done directly from the initial to the final stage—may result in serious flash congestion. Prior work strives to find a congestion-free update plan with multiple stages, each with the property that there will be no congestion independent of the update order. Yet congestion-free update may prevent the network from being fully utilized. It also requires solving a series of LP which is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose congestion-minimizing update and focus on two general problems: The first is to find routing at each intermediate stage that minimizes transient congestion for a given number of intermediate stages. The second is to find the minimum number of intermediate stages and an update plan for a given maximum level of transient congestion. We formulate them as two optimization programs and prove their hardness. We propose a set of algorithms to find the update plan in a scalable manner. Extensive experiments with Mininet show that our solution reduces update time by 50% and saves control overhead by 38% compared to prior work.