A Network Management Protocol for Sonification of Software-Defined Infrastructures

Network management traffic is usually carried in-band with the data plane traffic on a logically separate plane. For example, separate service queues and/or VLANs may be reserved for reliable and timely delivery of management messages. This approach has roots in history but carries a fundamental problem: fate sharing between the data plane traffic and management traffic. Failure in data plane networks often cuts off management traffic to the exact network regions at fault, making it impossible to achieve important and relevant management tasks, such as diagnostics and recovery. In this paper, we propose a network management protocol that enables programmability of out-of-channel management applications to combat the fate-sharing problem in Software-Defined Infrastructures. To test our approach and our implementation we used acoustics, a fairly unexplored physical layer for the control and management plane. We then use the notion of sonification to implement a few representative applications such as k-superseeder detection and TraceSound, a sonified version of traceroute, for out-of-channel network verification and debugging. While scaling acoustics could be an insurmountable challenge, our tests show how our protocol brings about a sound software-defined approach that can be expanded to other (combinations of) frequencies and even multiple physical channels.