Designing Dynamic Consistency for Multi-Controller Software Defined Network Topologies

Abstract

Motivated by the internet of the future, which will likely be considerably larger in size as well as highly decentralized, the trending research topic in the field of Software Defined Networking is the distribution of the control plane in order to meet the needs of the internet. In this research the concept of dynamic controllers is introduced into Software Defined Networking, these controllers can tune their own configurations in real-time in order to enhance the performance of the network. We used the consistency models in the context of distributed Software Defined Networks controllers as our tunable configuration. The project uses Mininet emulation environment, and POX as a controller to control this environment, the output of this research is a performance comparison of a proof-of-concept distributed load-balancing application when it runs on top of our proposed dynamic controller versus the usual static controller. The results showed that using dynamic consistency over the traditional static consistency is more beneficial in terms in network efficiency.