Management System of Heterogeneous Software-Defined Networking Controllers

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we studied the controller placement problem to improve the performance of the distributed control plane. When placing multiple controllers into their proper positions, the management of controllers is an important problem. In the distributed control plane, each software-defined networking (SDN) controller has its own control domain. To realize entire network control and management, these controllers must communicate with each other. However, there are no standard communication interfaces between controllers in the standard architecture of SDN. In particular, when there are heterogeneous controllers in a large-scale network, it is very difficult to coordinate these controllers to improve control plane performance. Moreover, heterogeneous controllers provide entirely different application programming interfaces (APIs) for users, leading to difficulties in management and application development. To address this problem, we propose a controller management system that consists of a heterogeneous controller management (HCM) module, domain relationships management (DRM) module, database module, and front-end module. This system can generate a global network view by collecting network information from a group of controllers while providing unified APIs for application developers that shield the differences among heterogeneous controllers.