Monday, November 24, 2008

A Policy-aware Switching Layer for Data Centers

The main idea of this paper is to provide a policy layer that does not mandate placing the middleboxes in sequence on the physical network paths. PLayer uses policies that propagate to the switches, which then route packets through middleboxes before delivering them to their destination.

This is a very nice idea that tries to alleviate the complexity of configuring middleboxes, ensures correctness, network flexibility and efficient resource usage. The authors also discuss why minimizing the changes required for adopting PLayer is crucial. It is true that the success of any new technique is tightly coupled to the amount of changes it requires for deployment.

It was nice that the authors also thought about security issues related to PLayer. They discuss how policy violations can take place during policy churn and how these can be solved.

I really liked reading the paper because it gave detailed explanation about the limitations of current techniques and explained PLayer very nicely with all relevant details listed. I would recommend keeping this paper in the class.

No comments: