ASIC: an architecture for scalable intra-domain control in OpenFlow

Currently, the architecture of network device is closed which is detrimental to network innovation. Software defined networking decouples the vertically coupled architecture and reconstructs the Internet as a modular structure. The idea of software defined networking is widely accepted. OpenFlow, a typical instance of the software defined networking, has been deployed by many universities and research institutions all over the world. With the increasing scale of deployment, the poor scalability of the OpenFlow centralized control mode becomes more and more obvious. To solve this scalability problem, this paper adopts the idea of load balance and proposes an architecture for the scalable intra-domain control named ASIC in OpenFlow. ASIC balances all the data flow initialization requests to several physical controllers in an OpenFlow network, and then, those requests are processed with a shared global network view in a parallel manner. ASIC also builds a data cluster for the global network view. By this way, the scalability problem in the intra-domain control plane could be completely solved. At the end of this paper, the emulation shows the feasibility of ASIC.