Design and implementation of the Maestro network control platform

Date
2009
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Abstract

Computer network operation is inherently complex because it consists of many functions such as routing, firewalling, VPN provisioning, traffic load-balancing, network maintenance, etc. To cope with this, network designers have created modular components to handle each function. Unfortunately, in reality, unavoidable dependencies exist among some of the components and they may interact accidentally. There is no single mechanism for systematically governing the interactions among the various components. In addition, routing is mainly realized by distributed routing protocols for higher survivability. Some other components need to be centralized, because either they have no obvious mapping onto distributed computations, or they could achieve more optimal solutions. Both distributed control and centralized control are necessary in network management. However, the interaction between distributed and centralized controls makes the problem even more complicated. No existing study has considered either how to systematically manage the interactions among network control components, or how distributed and centralized control system could collaborate to leverage the inherent advantages of both. To address these problems, we propose a system called Maestro. Maestro orchestrates the network control components that govern the behavior of a network, and enables the collaboration between distributed and centralized control components. Maestro provides abstractions for the modular implementation of network control components, and addresses the fundamental problems originating from the concurrent operations of network control components, namely communication between components, scheduling of component executions, concurrency management and protection enforcement. Maestro allows distributed and centralized control components to collaborate in four different approaches, and each approach has different strength and weakness. In this thesis we present the design and implementation of a prototype of Maestro, and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of Maestro mechanisms.

Description
Degree
Master of Science
Type
Thesis
Keywords
Computer science, Applied sciences
Citation

Cai, Zheng. "Design and implementation of the Maestro network control platform." (2009) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/61942.

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