Controller Placement for Improving Resilience of Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software-defined Network (SDN) is a new architectural framework for networking that decouples control plane from data plane and provides a programmatic interface to network control. SDN enables innovations of networking technologies for Internet and data centers today in order to ease the management of the highly dynamic and complex infrastructure, to support the fine-grained traffic engineering, and to better address the mobility of virtual machines, services, and end-points. However, SDN itself opens many unanswered questions regarding reliability, performance, and security. Controller placement is a critical problem in SDN that may affect many aspects of SDN. This work introduces the use of interdependence network analysis to study the controller placement for network resilience, designs a new resilience metric, and proposes a solution to improve resilience.