Zebra: An East-West Control Framework for SDN Controllers

Abstract

Traditional networks are surprisingly fragile and difficult to manage. Software Defined Networking (SDN) gained significant attention from both academia and industry, as if simplify network management through centralized configuration. Existing work primarily focuses on networks of limited scope such as data-centers and enterprises, which makes the development of SDN hindered when it comes to large-scale network environments. One way of enabling communication between data-centers, enterprises and ISPs in a large-scale network is to establish a standard communication mechanism between these entities. In this paper, we propose Zebra, a framework for enabling communication between different SDN domains. Zebra has two modules: Heterogeneous Controller Management (HCM) module and Domain Relationships Management (DRM) module. HCM collects network information from a group of controllers with no interconnection and generate a domain-wide network view. DRM collects network information from other domains to generate a global-wide network view. Moreover, HCM supports different SDN controllers, such as floodlight, maestro and so on. To test this framework, we develop a prototype system, and give some experimental results.