Gavel: Software-defined network control with graph databases

Abstract

Writing network policies for Software Defined Networks (SDNs) is not a straightforward task. Abstractions play a major role in easing this task, but they are typically provided for a particular use case. As a consequence, emerging applications will require the development and implementation of new abstractions, and combining the policies of different abstractions becomes difficult. To offer a simpler framework, plain data representations of the network and its control infrastructure have been proposed recently to offer programmable ad-hoc abstractions to administrators. However, these representations still induce unnecessary complexity and are additionally inferior to use function-specific abstractions from a performance point-of-view. In this work, we propose Gavel, an SDN controller based on a graph database. By exploiting the native graph support of the database engine, Gavel significantly eases application and policy writing. Additionally, we show by experimental evaluation of several typical applications that Gavel can significantly increase the performance when compared with previous works.