In our NOMS 2018 paper, we focus on how to deploy distributed controllers for programmable networks. To solve this challenging problem, we propose an approach that can automatically decide the number of controllers, their locations and control regions, and is guaranteed to find a non-congestion controller deployment plan fulfilling requirements such as reliability and bandwidth. We demonstrate, via experiments, that our approach allows for finding close to optimal solutions under varying conditions and achieves 20.1%-50.1% bandwidth usage reduction when compared with the state of the art.
Credit
This is joint work with Shaoteng Liu, Rebecca Steinert and Dejan Kostic. The work was done at RISE SICS Network Intelligence group. The full abstract is as follows:
Abstract
For large-scale programmable networks, flexible deployment of distributed control planes is essential for service availability and performance. However, existing approaches only focus on placing controllers whereas the consequent control traffic is often ignored. In this paper, we propose a black-box optimization framework offering the additional steps for quantifying the effect of the consequent control traffic when deploying a distributed control plane. Evaluating different implementations of the framework over real-world topologies shows that close to optimal solutions can be achieved. Moreover, experiments indicate that running a method for controller placement without considering the control traffic, cause excessive bandwidth usage (worst cases varying between 20.1%-50.1% more) and congestion, compared to our approach.