The Case for Data Plane Timestamping in SDN

摘要

This paper presents the case for Data Plane Timestamping (DPT). We argue thatin the unique environment of Software-Defined Networks (SDN), attaching atimestamp to the header of all packets is a powerful feature that can beleveraged by various diverse SDN applications. We analyze three key use casesthat demonstrate the advantages of using DPT, and show that SDN applicationscan benefit even from using as little as one bit for the timestamp field.