Kaki: Efficient Concurrent Update Synthesis for SDN

Modern computer networks based on the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm are becoming increasingly complex and often require frequent configuration changes in order to react to traffic fluctuations. It is essential that forwarding policies are preserved not only before and after the configuration update but also at any moment during the inherently distributed execution of such an update. We present Kaki, a Petri game based tool for automatic synthesis of switch batches which can be updated in parallel without violating a given (regular) forwarding policy like waypointing or service chaining. Kaki guarantees to find the minimum number of concurrent batches and supports both splittable and nonsplittable flow forwarding. In order to achieve optimal performance, we introduce two novel optimisation techniques based on static analysis: decomposition into independent subproblems and identification of switches that can be collectively updated in the same batch. These techniques considerably improve the performance of our tool Kaki, relying on TAPAAL's verification engine for Petri games as its backend. Experiments on a large benchmark of real networks from the Internet Topology Zoo database demonstrate that Kaki outperforms the state-of-the-art tools Netstack and FLIP. Kaki computes concurrent update synthesis significantly faster than Netstack and compared to FLIP, it provides shorter (and provably optimal) concurrent update sequences at similar runtimes.