DISCO: Distributed multi-domain SDN controllers

This paper proposes DISCO, an extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks and is implemented on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol.

Abstract

Modern multi-domain networks now span over datacenter networks, enterprise\nnetworks, customer sites and mobile entities. Such networks are critical and,\nthus, must be resilient, scalable and easily extensible. The emergence of\nSoftware-Defined Networking (SDN) protocols, which enables to decouple the data\nplane from the control plane and dynamically program the network, opens up new\nways to architect such networks. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an open and\nextensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and\nheterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks and wide area networks. DISCO\ncontrollers manage their own network domain and communicate with each others to\nprovide end-to-end network services. This communication is based on a unique\nlightweight and highly manageable control channel used by agents to\nself-adaptively share aggregated network-wide information. We implemented DISCO\non top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol. We\ndemonstrated how DISCO's control plane dynamically adapts to heterogeneous\nnetwork topologies while being resilient enough to survive to disruptions and\nattacks and providing classic functionalities such as end-point migration and\nnetwork-wide traffic engineering. The experimentation results we present are\norganized around three use cases: inter-domain topology disruption, end-to-end\npriority service request and virtual machine migration.\n