Distributed management of service-enabled flow-paths across multiple SDN domains

Future Internet may be comprised of interconnected multiple software-defined networks (SDN), where each domain is administered by a different controller or control plane. Provisioning of an end-to-end flow-path across such a network with specific service levels requires collaboration between domain controllers across control planes. A service-enabled flow-path shall be quality of service (QoS) enabled, reliable and/or secure, which requires a transport path with certain quantitative service level requirements such as high throughput, low packet loss, or high availability. Each SDN controller can autonomously determine such end-to-end flow-paths when all other SDN controllers periodically advertise to other controllers its available service-enabled paths. Doing so, each SDN controller is presented with several service-enabled path alternatives, crossing other domains, to choose from. We propose a multi-domain SDN controller design, wherein each SDN controller shares its network's “summarized” topology of service-enabled paths with other SDN controllers, such that all domains (controllers) have real-time autonomous decision making capability for end-to-end flow-path selection. We also describe how an SDN controller can reserve and release a flow traversing other SDN domains.