Sergeant, a distributed operating system for software defined networks

Sergeant is a distributed operating system for software defined networking. Programs run with sequential   consistency. and have reliable end-to-end atomicity across hardware and software. Furthermore, Sergeant provides isolation, access control, and uses a novel distributed algorithm to fairly schedule programs while allowing fine-grained parallelism.

Providing these guarantees is difficult because programmable switches have significant flexibility in how they process requests and software defined networking applications have very complex data access patterns. To address these challenges, Sergeant proposes a novel distributed scheduling algorithm, FDT, as well as mechanisms by which the OS can speculatively execute programs. Experimental results show that on a linear overlay topology of 4 OS nodes, each controlling 60 programmable switches, Sergeant can execute over two   thousand distributed programs per second with per-program latencies under of 2-3ms.

For more info, please contact: Behram Mistree