Abstract
Recent advances in information and communications cloud-based services hold the potential to overcome the scalability and complex maintenance limitations of traditional networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) surfaced as a promising paradigm to mitigate such limitations while offering flexible networks management. Particularly, SDN separates the control plane from the data plane to achieve abstraction of lower-level functionality, hence, allowing more efficient network management and utilization. However, SDN suffers from various performance and scalability problems leading to significant research efforts on maximizing the scalability of the control plane. This paper aims at reviewing different SDN controller scalability, topology-based and mechanism-based approaches, as well as discussing and analyzing how they attempt to solve the scalability challenge. Furthermore, this paper elaborates on the promising research trends and challenges. Our insights are also discussed to stimulate further research efforts addressing the control plane scalability in SDN.
Highlights
Emerging network services such as, high bandwidth, dynamic management, cloud computing and virtualization have gained enormous attentions in recent years
One of the main factors affecting this evolution is introducing the concept of separation between network control logic from the underlying hardware to achieve abstraction of lower-level functionality [5,6,7,8]
The major advantages of Software Defined Networking (SDN) are enabling efficient network administration, allowing its programmability and agility and achieving abstraction of lower-level functionality. This is due to decoupling the data plane from the control plane
Summary
Emerging network services such as, high bandwidth, dynamic management, cloud computing and virtualization have gained enormous attentions in recent years. One of the main factors affecting this evolution is introducing the concept of separation between network control logic (control plane) from the underlying hardware (data plane) to achieve abstraction of lower-level functionality [5,6,7,8]. SDN architecture encompasses data, control and application planes. Network devices in the underlying network infrastructure may include forwarding devices such as switches, routers, access points and so forth, which enable data transfer between end-users are placed on the data plane. This plane is programmed and managed by the control plane
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