Abstract
Software-defined networking decouples control and data plane in softwarized networks. This allows for centralized management of the network, but complete centralization of the controller functions raises potential issues related to failure, latency, and scalability. Distributed controller deployment is adopted to optimize scalability and latency problems. However, existing controllers are monolithic, resulting in code inefficiency for distributed deployment. Some seminal ongoing efforts have been proposed with the idea of disaggregating the SDN controller architecture into an assembly of various subsystems, each of which can be responsible for a certain controller task. These subsystems are typically implemented as microservices and deployed as virtual network functions, in particular as Docker Containers. This enables flexible deployment of controller functions. However, these proposals (e.g., muONOS) are still in their early stage of design and development, so that a full decomposition of the SDN controller is not been available yet. To fill that gap, this article derives some important design guidelines to decompose an SDN controller into a set of microservices. Next, it also proposes a microservices-based decomposed controller architecture, foreseeing communications issues between the controller sub-functions. These design and performance considerations are also proven via the implementation of the proposed architecture as a solution, called Micro-Services based SDN controller (MSN), based on the Ryu SDN controller. Moreover, MSN includes different network communication protocols, such as gRPC, WebSocket, and REST-API. Finally, we show experimental results that highlight the robustness and latency of the system on a networking testbed. Collected results prove the main pros and cons of each network communication protocol and an evaluation of our proposal in terms of system resilience, scalability and latency.
Highlights
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that aims to give a definitive solution to break the limitations of traditional network infrastructure [1]
The SDN features including dynamic flow control and the possibility to reconfigure the network according to application needs make it an enabler for the 5G next-generation Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks
Most SDN controllers are deployed as a monolithic block, and that can make them not efficient enough to cover the requirements of the IIoT networks such as scalability and robustness
Summary
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking paradigm that aims to give a definitive solution to break the limitations of traditional network infrastructure [1]. The implementation is not completed yet and that hinders the possibility to thoroughly test it To overcome all those limitations, we propose a novel microservices-based SDN controller decomposed architecture based on Ryu SDN Controller called MSN that has been designed for next-generation 5G RAN Edge deployments and shows several original elements.
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