Evaluation of a Distributed Control Plane for Managing Heterogeneous SDN-enabled and Legacy Networks

Abstract

With the increasing number of devices, protocols and applications, today’s networks are becoming more and more complex. Hence, Software-defined Networking (SDN) tries to address this issue by separating the data from the control plane and by providing centralized interfaces for network configuration. As legacy devices cannot be replaced instantly due to high costs, both network segments have to be operated in coexistence with defined joints at their edges. To ensure a smooth operation, both controlling instances of these segments are required to exchange information. In this work, we design and implement a data model for storing the information needed to keep the controller and a Network Management System (NMS) synchronized, which are responsible for configuring the SDN-enabled network and the legacy devices respectively. For this, we implement and evaluate a total of three different synchronization strategies by the example of an SDN-based Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) use case.