An SDN‐based scalable routing and resource management model for service provider networks

Abstract

Volume of the Internet traffic has increased significantly in recent years. Service providers (SPs) are now striving to make resource management and considering dynamically changing large volume of network traffic. In this context, software defined networking (SDN) has been alluring the attention of SPs, as it provides virtualization, programmability, ease of management, and so on. Yet severe scalability issues are one of the key challenges of the SDN due to its centralized architecture. First of all, SDN controller may become the bottleneck as the number of flows and switches increase. It is because routing and admission control decisions are made per flow basis by the controller. Second, there is a signaling overhead between the controller and switches since the controller makes decisions on behalf of them. In line with the aforementioned explanations, this paper proposes an SDN-based scalable routing and resource management model (SRRM) for SPs. The proposed model is twofold. SRRM performs routing, admission control, and signaling operations (RASOs) in a scalable manner.Additionally, resource management has also been accomplished to increase link use. To achieve high degree of scalability and resource use, pre-established paths (PEPs) between each edge node in the domain are provided. The proposed controller performs RASOs based on PEPs. The controller also balances the load of PEPs and adjusts their path capacities dynamically to increase resource use. Experimental results show that SRRM can successfully perform RASOs in a scalable way and also increase link use even under heavy traffic loads. KEYWORDScontroller design, OpenFlow, pre-established paths, resource management, software-defined net- working, virtualizationInt J Commun Syst. 2018;31:e3530.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac Software-defined networking (SDN) 1 is an emerging network architecture. It allows network operators to perform disjoint network operations (eg, load balancing and resource management) in a single framework by separating the control and forwarding functions. Briefly, Figure 1 depicts 3 layers of SDN. The infrastructure layer (data plane) is the layer at the bottom. Entities in this layer usually performs actions of forwarding, dropping, and altering packets but not limited to them. Control layer (control plane) is logically centralized and performs decision making on behalf of the entities in data plane. The application layer contains applications and services that use the services provided in control layer. The separation of control and forwarding functions of SDN allows the network control to be programmable, brings intelligence to network with centralized management, simplifies network design and management through open standards, and so on. Therefore, SDN allures the attention of SPNs.Although SDN has many benefits, there are several limitations as well. 2 First of all, SDN controller is the only entity that makes decision on behalf of all the underlying switches. As SDN controller makes per-flow basis online decisions, it ma...

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