A scalable peer-to-peer control plane architecture for Software Defined Networks

Control plane scalability is one of the major concerns in Software Defined Networking (SDN) deployment. Although the centralization of the control plane by decoupling it from the data plane facilitates ease of network management, however, it introduces new challenges. One of these challenges is to maintain performance, consistency, and scalability while minimizing the corresponding overheads. In this paper, we propose an architecture that allows the control plane to evolve at a hyper-scale level as well as address important performance and reliability issues. A hierarchical control plane architecture with peer-to-peer communication among logically distributed controllers is designed with the goal of achieving optimum performance and consistency gains while mitigating overheads. A root controller is deployed at the top layer of the hierarchy to maintain global network view. The proposed model is helpful in improving network robustness against failures and supporting a desired level of reliability. To evaluate our model, we developed a realistic emulation platform using ONOS, FlowVisor, Mininet, and Open vSwitch. The proposed architecture is compared with earlier solutions and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.