Time4: Time for SDN

With the rise of Software Defined Networks (SDN), there is growing interest in dynamic and centralized traffic engineering, where decisions about forwarding paths are taken dynamically from a network-wide perspective. Frequent path reconfiguration can significantly improve the network performance, but should be handled with care, so as to minimize disruptions that may occur during network updates. In this paper we introduce Time4, an approach that uses accurate time to coordinate network updates. Time4 is a powerful tool in softwarized environments, that can be used for various network update scenarios. Specifically, we characterize a set of update scenarios called flow swaps, for which Time4 is the optimal update approach, yielding less packet loss than existing update approaches. We define the lossless flow allocation problem, and formally show that in environments with frequent path allocation, scenarios that require simultaneous changes at multiple network devices are inevitable. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Time4-enabled OpenFlow prototype. The prototype is publicly available as open source. Our work includes an extension to the OpenFlow protocol that has been adopted by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and is now included in OpenFlow 1.5. Our experimental results show the significant advantages of Time4 compared to other network update approaches, and demonstrate an SDN use case that is infeasible without Time4.Comment: This report is an extended version of "Software Defined Networks: It's About Time", which was accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2016. A preliminary version of this report was published in arXiv in May, 201

Precession Optomechanics

We propose a light-structure interaction that utilizes circularly polarized light to deform a slightly bent waveguide. The mechanism allows for flipping the direction of deformation upon changing the binary polarization state of light from -\hbar to +\hbar.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Continuous Consensus with Ambiguous Failures

Abstract. Continuous consensus (CC) is the problem of maintaining an identical and up-to-date core of information about the past at all correct processes in the system [1]. This is a primitive that supports simultaneous coordination among processes, and eliminates the need of issuing separate instances of consensus for different tasks. Recent work has presented new simple and efficient optimum protocols for continuous consensus in the crash and (sending) omissions failure models. For every pattern of failures, these protocols maintain at each and every time point a core that subsumes that maintained by any other continuous consensus protocol. This paper considers the continuous consensus problem in the face of harsher failures: general omissions and authenticated Byzantine failures. Computationally efficient optimum protocols for CC do not exist in these models if P � = NP. A variety of CC protocols are presented. The first is a simple protocol that enters every interesting event into the core within t + 1 rounds (where t is the bound on the number of failures), provided there are a majority of correct processes. The second is a protocol that achieves similar performance so long as n> t (i.e., there is always guaranteed to be at least one correct process). The final protocol in the general omissions model makes use of active failure monitoring and failure detection to include events in the core much faster in many runs of interest. Its performance is established based on a nontrivial property of minimal vertex covers in undirected graphs. The results are adapted to the authenticated Byzantine failure model, in which it is assumed that faulty processes are malicious, but correct processes have unforgeable signatures. Finally, the problem of uniform CC is considered. It is shown that a straightforward version of uniform CC is not solvable in the setting under study. A weaker form of uniform CC is defined, and protocols achieving it are presented

Continuous consensus via common knowledge

This paper introduces the continuous consensus problem, in which a core M[k] of information is continuously maintained at all correct sites of the system. All local copies of the core must be identical at all times k, and every interesting event should eventually enter the core. The continuous consensus problem is studied in synchronous systems with crash and omission failures, assuming an upper bound of t on the number of failures in any given run of the system. A simple protocol for continuous consensus, called ConCon, is presented. This protocol is knowledge-based: The actions processes take depend explicitly on their knowledge, as well as on their knowledge of what other processes know about failures and about events that occurred in the system. A close connection between continuous consensus and knowledge is established by showing that in every continuous consensus protocol, the information in the core at any given time must be common knowledge. Based on the characterization of common knowledge by Moses and Tuttle, it is shown that ConCon is an optimum protocol for continuous consensus, maintaining the most up-to-date core possible at all times: For every pattern of failures and external inputs and each point in time, the core provided by ConCon contains the cores of all correct protocols for continuous consensus. Indeed, th