End-to-End Wireless Control Plane for SDN in Data Centers

Abstract

Enabling Software Defined Networking (SDN) in existing data centres, requires the deployment of an entire physical wired network for either control or data plane. This leads to high cost and cabling complexity. This paper presents an end to end wireless control plane architecture to be deployed on top of the existing wired data centre network. In the proposed architecture, Top of Rack wireless switches (ToR Switches) are introduced, these switches are grouped in to clusters and connected to the SDN Controller via wireless Access Points (APs) and Relay Nodes (RNs). Since control traffic is lower in comparison to the data traffic, we propose 2.4/5 GHz band to be used between cluster of switches and an AP. Whereas 60 GHz band is proposed between AP/RN and a controller. The efficacy of the proposed architecture depends on its ability to use minimum number of APs/RNs such that the control traffic demands of the switches are fulfilled. In this regard two algorithms are proposed. First algorithm clusters the switches and places minimum number of APs. In the second algorithm, minimum number of RNs are placed such that all the APs are connected to the Controller. The simulation results imply that with the proposed architecture the cabling complexity in the control plane is reduced to zero and additional switches may be easily added. Furthermore, the cost of deploying an end-to-end wireless control plane is far less than the wired counterpart.