| Abstract |
It is essential that software defined coalition (SDC) programming addresses fundamental complexities well beyond data center software defined networking (SDN). Specifically, SDC datapath should support the complete range of device resources, including both networking resources and more general-compute resources, to support in-network computing (INC) capabilities (e.g., network coding) that can be essential for settings such as wireless transmissions. In this paper, we investigate an SDC datapath called OpenSDC with three basic, but fundamental primitives that are not supported in SDN: (1) generic-compute packet buffer; (2) packet INC block beyond SDN match-action to support complex operations on both packet headers and payload; and (3) event store to handle a wide range of events in SDC (e.g., link failure and timer expiration). The three primitives, although simple, can provide substantial SDC computing capabilities including resilient routing. We design, implement and optimize OpenSDC using a range of techniques (e.g., bit-wise arithmetic operation and look-up table). We demonstrate the ability of OpenSDC in the setting of realizing network-coding-based 1+1 data delivery protection in dynamic tactical networks. Evaluation results show that compared with a state-of-the-art protection system implemented using only match-action tables, OpenSDC can significantly improve the efficiency and resiliency of tactical networks. Preliminary results appeared in MILCOM 2018. |