Waterfall: Conflict Detection and Resolution Model for SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) centralizes network management by using device-specific flow rules to control hardware and policies. When administrators deploy new rules, the network controller verifies them against existing configurations to prevent conflicts and maintain security, functionality, and consistency. However, traditional conflict-detection methods are computationally expensive because they require all flow-rules to be compared against each other. Consequently, existing methods fail to scale, and have delayed or inaccurate conflict resolution, causing network disruption and inefficiency.

 

Researchers at Arizona State University have developed “Waterfall”, a novel approach to optimize conflict detection in SDN by creating and prioritizing Equivalence Classes of flow rules and using a multi-stage, waterfall-like algorithm. It leverages Bloom filters and sequential attribute processing to minimize the search space, significantly speeding up conflict detection and resolution while maintaining high accuracy and scalability even with large datasets.

 

Waterfall is an efficient, scalable model for real-time conflict detection and resolution in SDN flow rules.

 

 

For more information about this opportunity, please see