Research Area:  Software Defined Networks

Abstract:

Recent advances in information and communications cloud-based services hold the potential to overcome the scalability and complex maintenance limitations of traditional networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) surfaced as a promising paradigm to mitigate such limitations while offering flexible networks management. Particularly, SDN separates the control plane from the data plane to achieve abstraction of lower-level functionality, hence, allowing more efficient network management and utilization. However, SDN suffers from various performance and scalability problems leading to significant research efforts on maximizing the scalability of the control plane. This paper aims at reviewing different SDN controller scalability, topology-based and mechanism-based approaches, as well as discussing and analyzing how they attempt to solve the scalability challenge. Furthermore, this paper elaborates on the promising research trends and challenges. Our insights are also discussed to stimulate further research efforts addressing the control plane scalability in SDN.

Keywords:  
SDN
control plane
scalability
topological-based approaches
mechanisms-based approaches
parallelism optimization
routing-scheme optimization
machine learning optimization

Author(s) Name:  Abdelrahman Abuarqoub

Publisher name:  MDPI

DOI:  10.3390/fi12030049

Volume Information:  Volume 12 Issue 3

Paper Link:   https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/3/49