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The controller placement problem
Abstract
Network architectures such as Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) move the control logic off packet processing devices and onto external controllers. These network architectures with decoupled control planes open many unanswered questions regarding reliability, scalability, and performance when compared to more traditional purely distributed systems. This paper opens the investigation by focusing on two specific questions: given a topology, how many controllers are needed, and where should they go? To answer these questions, we examine fundamental limits to control plane propagation latency on an upcoming Internet2 production deployment, then expand our scope to over 100 publicly available WAN topologies. As expected, the answers depend on the topology. More surprisingly, one controller location is often sufficient to meet existing reaction-time requirements (though certainly not fault tolerance requirements).
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Citations
Cited by
Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Survey
Kreutz, D., Ramos, F. M. V., Esteves Verissimo, P., Esteve Rothenberg, C., Azodolmolky, S., & Uhlig, S. (2015) · Proceedings of the IEEE · doi:10.1109/jproc.2014.2371999 · Cited by 5,050
A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present, and Future of Programmable Networks
Nunes, B. A. A., Mendonca, M., Nguyen, X.-N., Obraczka, K., & Turletti, T. (2014) · IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials · doi:10.1109/surv.2014.012214.00180 · Cited by 2,203
A roadmap for traffic engineering in SDN-OpenFlow networks
Akyildiz, I. F., Lee, A., Wang, P., Luo, M., & Chou, W. (2014) · Computer Networks · doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2014.06.002 · Cited by 536
Distributed SDN Control: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges
Bannour, F., Souihi, S., & Mellouk, A. (2018) · IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials · doi:10.1109/comst.2017.2782482 · Cited by 452
Dynamic Controller Provisioning in Software Defined Networks
Bari, M. F., Roy, A. R., Chowdhury, S. R., Zhang, Q., Zhani, M. F., Ahmed, R., & Boutaba, R. (2013) · Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2013) · doi:10.1109/cnsm.2013.6727805 · Cited by 369
Metadata
- Authors
- Heller, B., Sherwood, R., & McKeown, N.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2012-08-13
- Pages
- 7-12
- OpenAlex
- W2136835942
- Cited by
- 869
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 45.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Heller, B., Sherwood, R., & McKeown, N. (2012). The controller placement problem. Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks. https://doi.org/10.1145/2342441.2342444
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
