2019/01/25 by Konstantinos Poularakis, Qiaofeng Qin, Poularakis, Konstantinos +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1901.08936
IEEE Infocom 2019
arxiv created 2019/01/25 · openalex publication_date 2019/01/25 · arxiv updated 2019/01/28 · openalex created_date 2022/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Since the early development of Software-Defined Network (SDN) technology, researchers have been concerned with the idea of physical distribution of the control plane to address scalability and reliability challenges of centralized designs. However, having multiple controllers managing the network while maintaining a "logically-centralized" network view brings additional challenges. One such challenge is how to coordinate the management decisions made by the controllers which is usually achieved by disseminating synchronization messages in a peer-to-peer manner. While there exist many architectures and protocols to ensure synchronized network views and drive coordination among controllers, there is no systematic methodology for deciding the optimal frequency (or rate) of message dissemination. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing the SDN synchronization problem: how often to synchronize the network views for each controller pair. We consider two different objectives; first, the maximization of the number of controller pairs that are synchronized, and second, the maximization of the performance of applications of interest which may be affected by the synchronization rate. Using techniques from knapsack optimization and learning theory, we derive algorithms with provable performance guarantees for each objective. Evaluation results demonstrate significant benefits over baseline schemes that synchronize all controller pairs at equal rate.