Dynamic control plane management for software-defined networks

Summary Software‐defined network (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that allows flexible network management by providing programmability from a separated control plane. Because of the centralized management scheme that SDN adopts, intensive control plane overhead incurs as the scale of SDN increases. The control plane overhead is mainly caused by a massive amount of control messages generated during data plane monitoring and reactive flow instantiation. By far, very few works have addressed the overhead issue on reaction flow instantiation; therefore, we mainly focus on alleviating such overhead in this work. To achieve this goal, we propose a new control plane management (CPMan) method. CPMan aims to realize the following two objectives: first, reduce the number of control messages exchanged through the control channel and second, evenly distribute the control workload across multiple controllers to mitigate the potential performance bottleneck. To realize the former, we propose a lightweight feedback loop‐based control scheme, whereas for the latter, we propose a dynamic switch‐to‐controller (DSC) placement scheme. To show the feasibility of our proposal, we implemented a prototype of the two proposed schemes on top of a carrier‐grade SDN controller and validated its performance in an emulated network. We achieved approximately 57.13% overhead reduction with feedback loop‐based control scheme, while achieved approximately 98.68% balance ratio with DSC placement scheme. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A centralized management scheme of software‐defined networks (SDN) aggravates the control plane overhead and burdens the adoption of SDN to production networks. In this paper, we propose a new control plane management (CPMan) method that aims to reduce and distribute the control plane overhead to improve the control plane performance. To realize the objectives, we propose a lightweight feedback loop‐based control scheme and a dynamic switch‐to‐controller (DSC) placement scheme and implement a prototype on top of a carrier‐grade SDN controller to validate feasibility of the proposed scheme.