Title: SAHAR: a control plane architecture for high available software-defined networks

Authors: Mehran Shetabi; Ahmad Akbari

Addresses: School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran; Department of Computer Engineering, Yazd University, Iran ' School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran

Abstract: Software-defined networking (SDN) is an architectural paradigm which enables a centralised control by decoupling the data and control planes of a network. In reactive mode of SDN, the significant variation in flow arrival events places considerable stress on the control plane. Also, the existence of frequent events such as network-wide statistics collection which significantly interfere with the basic functions of control plane can drastically affect performance of control plane. Therefore, this paper introduces a new architectural model named SAHAR that uses a controller box consisting of a coordinator controller and a primary flow-setup controller and one or more secondary flow-setup controllers as needed. Assigning monitor and management tasks to the coordinator controller reduces the load on the flowsetup controllers. Also, dividing input traffic between flow-setup controllers by the coordinator controller distributes the load in the control plane. In this way, SAHAR achieves a high available SDN which can be scalable.

Keywords: software-defined networking; SDN; OpenFlow; availability; multiple-controllers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2020.107467

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2020 Vol.24 No.4, pp.409 - 440

Received: 29 Oct 2018
Accepted: 30 Jan 2019
Published online: 29 May 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article