Gavel: Towards a graph database Defined Network

摘要

SDN (Software-Defined Networking) promises easier management of complex networks. In abiding by this promise northbound APIs play a major role, as they provide abstractions to ease the process of writing network applications. As more and more of such abstractions emerge, one challenging task is to orchestrate different policies that originate from different abstractions. In an effort to provide automation for this process, recent research has suggested to replace the application-specific abstractions by a primitive, SQL-based data representation of the entire network control infrastructure. This representation can then be transformed into higher-level abstractions. However, the use of relational databases results in performance inferior to existing controllers and still requires complex application writing. To address these issues, in this work we introduce Gavel, a graph database based controller which exploits the natural graph structure of computer networks. Based on results obtained from a prototype implementation, we show that Gavel not only simplifies application writing, but at the same time offers a significantly better performance than existing schemes.