Distributed Control in Virtualized Networks

Abstract

The increasing number of the Internet connected devices requires novel solutions to control the next generation network resources. The cooperation between the Software Defined Network (SDN) and the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) seems to be a promising technology paradigm. The bottleneck of current SDN/NFV implementations is the use of a centralized controller. In this paper, different scenarios to identify the pro and cons of a distributed control-plane were investigated. We implemented a prototypal framework to benchmark different centralized and distributed approaches. The test results have been critically analyzed and related considerations and recommendations have been reported. The outcome of our research influenced the control plane design of the following European R&D projects: PLATINO, FI-WARE and T-NOVA.

Lyapunov-Based Design of a Distributed Wardrop Load-Balancing Algorithm With Application to Software-Defined Networking

“…Therefore, an architectural improvement (Fig. 1.b) consists in physically distributing the SDN Control Plane among 𝐾 SDN Controllers, arranged to form a cluster, with a node playing the role of cluster coordinator [20].…”

Performance analysis and evaluation of software defined networking distributed controllers in datacentre networks

“…In Tootoonchian et al (2012), the authors evaluate the performance of the floodlight controller on a single server and shown that it can handle over 1.6 million requests per second with an average response time of 2 ms. Also, the authors in Zuccaro et al (2015) present the evaluation result of SDN performance, where the authors run a single controller and determine that a single controller can control up to 5,000 switches with 46 cores. They were able to achieve a throughput of 14 million flows per second with a latency of 200 μs.…”