2015/04/10 by Kai Zheng, Lin Wang, Zheng, Kai +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1504.02609
11 pages
arxiv created 2015/04/10 · openalex publication_date 2015/04/10 · arxiv updated 2015/04/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The advent of software defined networking enables flexible, reliable and feature-rich control planes for data center networks. However, the tight coupling of centralized control and complete visibility leads to a wide range of issues among which scalability has risen to prominence. To address this, we present LazyCtrl, a novel hybrid control plane design for data center networks where network control is carried out by distributed control mechanisms inside independent groups of switches while complemented with a global controller. Our design is motivated by the observation that data center traffic is usually highly skewed and thus edge switches can be grouped according to traffic locality. LazyCtrl aims at bringing laziness to the global controller by dynamically devolving most of the control tasks to independent switch groups to process frequent intra-group events near datapaths while handling rare inter-group or other specified events by the controller. We implement LazyCtrl and build a prototype based on Open vSwich and Floodlight. Trace-driven experiments on our prototype show that an effective switch grouping is easy to maintain in multi-tenant clouds and the central controller can be significantly shielded by staying lazy, with its workload reduced by up to 82%.