A Consensus Approach for SDN Controllers based on Blockchain

Abstract

SDN has been proposed to realize flexible network management. Due to the network becomes more complex, multiple controllers are required in SDN. It brings cooperative operation problem among multiple SDN controllers. To solve this problem, common method is to set up a central SDN controller management platform, which increases the construction and operation costs. In this paper, we propose a consensus approach for SDN controllers based on blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed data management technology. Using this feature, we select the mater controller which has the most abundant resources. The master node completes the production and entry of the block, while the ordinary node accepts the block produced by the master one. To realize this approach, we propose a resource data model of the SDN controller first and a consensus method based on blockchain and this data model.