Research Area:  Software Defined Networks
With the increasing popularity of Software defined network (SDN), designing a scalable SDN control plane becomes a critical problem. An effective approach to improving the scalability is to design distributed architecture of SDN control plane. However, how to evaluate the scalability of SDN control planes remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a metric of scalability for SDN control planes, and study three typical SDN control plane structures, including centralized, decentralized and hierarchical architectures. We build performance models for response time, based on which we evaluate the scalability of these three structures. Furthermore, the comparison between different architectures are analyzed by mathematical methods. Numerical evaluations are also conducted to validate the conclusions drawn in this paper.
Keywords:  
Scalability
control planes
Software defined networks
Author(s) Name:  Jie Hu; Chuang Lin; Xiangyang Li; Jiwei Huang
Journal name:  
Conferrence name:  2014 IEEE 22nd International Symposium of Quality of Service (IWQoS)
Publisher name:  IEEE
DOI:  10.1109/IWQoS.2014.6914314
Volume Information:  
Paper Link:   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6914314