Sharing data store and backup controllers for resilient control plane in multi-domain SDN

Abstract

software-defined networking (SDN) uses a centralized control plane to manage the whole network. If the scale of the network is large, it is necessary to divide it into multiple domains. Since the network scale becomes larger, the probability of failure occurrences is higher. Therefore, it is important to guarantee the control plane resilience in multi-domain SDN. However, the existing approaches cannot store the network state in real time, and do not consider the backup controllers placement problem in multi-domain SDN. In order to ensure the resilience of the control plane in multi-domain SDN, we propose a sharing data store and backup controllers based approach. Sharing data store is used to ensure that each master controller has a view of the whole network and data store can save the network state during the failure time. The sharing backup controllers are used to guarantee the resilience of control plane with minimum cost. Simulations show that our approach can use as less backup controllers as possible to ensure the resilience of control plane.