Traffic Management Applications for Stateful SDN Data Plane

The successful Open Flow approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows network programmability through a central controller able to orchestrate a set of dumb switches. However, the simple match/action abstraction of Open Flow switches constrains the evolution of the forwarding rules to be fully managed by the controller. This can be particularly limiting for a number of applications that are affected by the delay of the slow control path, like traffic management applications. Some recent proposals are pushing toward an evolution of the Open Flow abstraction to enable the evolution of forwarding policies directly in the data plane based on state machines and local events. In this paper, we present two traffic management applications that exploit a stateful data plane and their prototype implementation based on Open State, an Open Flow evolution that we recently proposed.