Inproceedings,
Evaluation of a Distributed Control Plane for Managing Heterogeneous SDN-enabled and Legacy Networks
7th International Conference on Communications and Electronics (ICCE), Hue, Vietnam, (July 2018)
Abstract
With the increasing number of devices, protocols
and applications, today’s networks are becoming more and more
complex. Hence, Software-defined Networking (SDN) tries to ad-
dress this issue by separating the data from the control plane and
by providing centralized interfaces for network configuration. As
legacy devices cannot be replaced instantly due to high costs,
both network segments have to be operated in coexistence with
defined joints at their edges. To ensure a smooth operation, both
controlling instances of these segments are required to exchange
information. In this work, we design and implement a data model
for storing the information needed to keep the controller and a
Network Management System (NMS) synchronized, which are
responsible for configuring the SDN-enabled network and the
legacy devices respectively. For this, we implement and evaluate a
total of three different synchronization strategies by the example
of an SDN-based Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) use case.
Index Terms—SDN, NMS, Management, Integration, Hetero-
geneous Networks, Distributed Control Plane.
