Integrating network management information into the SDN control plane

Abstract

With software defined networking (SDN), operators benefit from a higher flexibility, cost efficiency, as well as programmability of their networks. Since modern networks are comprised of a multitude of heterogeneous devices and also include non-SDN legacy devices, network management systems (NMSs) are often used in order to monitor and configure the network. Although both, the SDN controller and the NMS, have a centralized view of the network, they operate at different time scales and deal with information at different levels of granularity. In this work, we investigate the impact on the network performance when an NMS regularly provides information to an SDN controller. To this end, we design, implement, and compare three interaction mechanisms based on the ONOS controller. These represent different trade-offs regarding the complexity of the resulting system and its performance. In addition to the default ONOS controller, we develop two extended versions. One performs hash-based load balancing on equal cost paths while the other utilizes external NMS information via ONOS's intent and annotation framework to optimize control plane decisions. In addition to evaluations that show a significant performance improvement when using the optimized controllers, we present a parameter study that highlights the performance impact of network characteristics like the flow interarrival time, the flow duration, and the number of active flows.