Distributed SDN Control: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges

Abstract

As opposed to the decentralized control logic underpinning the devising of the Internet as a complex bundle of box-centric protocols and vertically integrated solutions, the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm advocates the separation of the control logic from hardware and its centralization in software-based controllers. These key tenets offer new opportunities to introduce innovative applications and incorporate automatic and adaptive control aspects, thereby, easing network management and guaranteeing the user’s quality of experience. Despite the excitement, SDN adoption raises many challenges including the scalability and reliability issues of centralized designs that can be addressed with the physical decentralization of the control plane. However, such physically distributed, but logically centralized systems bring an additional set of challenges. This paper presents a survey on SDN with a special focus on the distributed SDN control. Besides reviewing the SDN concept and studying the SDN architecture as compared to the classical one, the main contribution of this survey is a detailed analysis of state-of-the-art distributed SDN controller platforms which assesses their advantages and drawbacks and classifies them in novel ways (physical and logical classifications) in order to provide useful guidelines for SDN research and deployment initiatives. A thorough discussion on the major challenges of distributed SDN control is also provided along with some insights into emerging and future trends in that area.