An Empirical Study of Software Reliability in SDN Controllers

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) exposes critical networking decisions, such as traffic routing or enforcement of the critical security policies, to a software entity known as the SDN controller. Controller software, as written by humans, is intrinsically prone to bugs, which may impair the network performance as a whole, if activated. Software reliability growth models (SRGM) are often used to estimate and predict the reliability of the software in the operational phase based on the fault report data during the testing phase. These models can be used to predict the number of residual bugs in the software, as well as failure intensity, software reliability and optimal software release time. In this paper we analyze ten releases of ONOS open source controller, whose uncensored fault reports are available online.