DSF: A Distributed SDN Control Plane Framework for the East/West Interface

Abstract

The ever-increasing number of network-capable devices places a massive burden on modern networks. Communication infrastructure should provide quality-of-service essentials in terms of highbandwidth capacity, scalability, resiliency, and security. Programmable networks are viewed as the prevailing method of encountering the challenges introduced by the accelerated expansion. The ability of softwaredefined networking (SDN) to separate the control plane from the data plane and enable the programmability of the network creates new ways to architect the network. The centralization of control logic introduces complexities in large-scale, distributed networks such as performance bottlenecks and reliability. Distributed SDN controllers have been proposed to overcome the performance concerns. The lack of a communication standard among distributed controllers, referred to as the East/West interface, presents a challenge in the adoption of SDN in large-scale, distributed networks. In this paper, we propose Distributed SDN control plane Framework (DSF)-a framework for the East/West interface for heterogeneous, distributed SDN controllers to synchronize topologies using a standardized data-centric real-time publish/subscribe paradigm known as the Data Distribution Service (DDS). Distributed control plane architectures are proposed using DSF: flat, hierarchical, and T-model. The DSF interface is implemented on multiple SDN control plane platforms to evaluate performance: Floodlight and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controllers. Test cases with different configurations are designed for performance evaluation of the proposed interface in homogeneous and heterogeneous SDN control planes. In addition, a performance comparison is presented of DSF-based ONOS controllers versus Atomix-based ONOS cluster solutions.

A Comparative and Analytical Study for Choosing the Best Suited SDN Network Operating System for Cloud Data Center

“…Single SDN NOS represents a single point of failure, which could be problematic because there is a big number of devices in the data plane of CDC. Therefore, the distributed architecture of many SDN NOSs, to improve the availability, can be employed using westbound and eastbound APIs to maintain the synchronization [32] [33]. Furthermore, the faults represent a critical challenge to meet SLAs.…”

Reliability Aware Multiple Path Installation in Software-Defined Networking

“…Since the secondary controllers on the fly management can cause the synchronization and cost elevation challenges in small softwarized networks. In this regard, in the related work, there are controller placement algorithms and assembly models to support the East-West interfacing of controllers (horizontal, vertical and hybrid models) [13][14][15]. These models support the homogeneous and heterogeneous control function entities with objectives of scalability and distributed computing.…”

Security Enhancement in Software Defined Networking (SDN): A Threat Model

“…A multi controller solution for addressing the scalability issue of controller has been provisioned in openflow 1.3. Various controllers need to communicate with controller in other domain for performing various operations to fulfill the network requirements [57]. A secure and real time communication of controllers is an open research problem.…”