1. Tesseract: A 4D Network Control Plane
Sam McIngvale
Yu Zhang

2. Why 4D?
Why not 3D or 5D?

3. Single Point-of-Failure
Tesseract design essentially reduces the network to a single DE.
If this DE fails or is compromised, the entire network is at stake.
Even with multiple DE’s, the network is at a greater risk because there always a single point-of-failure

4. Efficiency of the Decision Plane
Maybe efficient on single link failure.
Different story when multiple failures happen.
How many events will be collected during the hold-down timers?

5. Overall Efficency p.1
Currently, Tesseract is already slower than fast OSPF
Lots of encryption
All dessemination plane traffic is encrypted/decrypted at each node
All BGP traffic is encrypted and must be sent to the DE
All DHCP reqests are encrypted and must be sent to the DE

6. Overall Efficency p.2 Tesseract not tested in the wild
Convergence times could actually be much slower given the fact that end-host traffic was not present in simulations
Network can bottleneck at DE
Thus, the network can only be as fast as the DE allows it to be.

7. Emulation and Simulation
Can it represent what’s happening in the real world?
The time required for the entire network to reconverge after an event.
Until Tesseract is tested in the wild, we will not know how it performs under the strains of real-world traffic

8. Do not give better performance!

9. Overhead Increases Exponentially

10. Scalability
Can it scale to today’s Internet?
Tomorrow?