Optimal state replication in stateful data planes

In SDN stateful data planes, switches can execute algorithms to process traffic based on local states. This approach permits to offload decisions from the controller to the switches, thus reducing the latency when reacting to network events. We consider distributed network applications that process traffic at each switch based on local replicas of network-wide states. Replicating a state across multiple switches poses many challenges, because the number of state replicas and their placement affects both the data traffic distribution and the amount of synchronization traffic among the replicas. In this paper, we formulate the optimal placement problem for replicated states, taking into account the data traffic routing, to ensure that traffic flows are properly managed by network applications, and the synchronization traffic between replicas, to ensure state coherence. Due to the high complexity required to find the optimal solution, we also propose an approximated algorithm to scale to large network instances. We numerically show that this algorithm, despite its simplicity, well approximates the optimal solution. We also show the beneficial effects of state replication with respect to the single-replica scenario, so far considered in the literature. Finally, we provide an asymptotic analysis to find the optimal number of replicas.