Customizable network update planning in SDN

Updating network configurations responding to dynamic changes is a error-prone task in SDN. During the update process, in-flight packets might misuse different versions of rules, and “hot” links could be overloaded due to the unplanned update order. As for the problem of misusing rules, recently proposed suggestions like two-phase mechanism and Customizable Consistency Generator (CCG) have provided generic and customizable solutions. Yet, there does not exist an approach that is flexible to avoid the transient congestion on hot links respecting to diverse user requirements like guaranteeing update deadline, managing transient throughput loss, etc.; controllers are in urgent need of such a solution.