Scalability of control planes for Software defined networks: Modeling and evaluation

• Published in: 2014 IEEE 22nd International Symposium of Quality of Service (IWQoS) pp. 147 - 152
• Main Authors: Jie Hu, Chuang Lin, Xiangyang Li, Jiwei Huang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-05-2014
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Control systems; Measurement; Process control; Quality of service; Scalability; Time factors
• ISSN: 1548-615X
• DOI: 10.1109/IWQoS.2014.6914314

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.