Control Plane Delay Research Articles

SRetor: a semi-centralized regular topology routing scheme for data center networking

The performance of the data center network is critical for lowering costs and increasing efficiency. The software-defined networks (SDN) technique has been adopted in data center networks due to the recent emergence of advanced network control and flexibility demand. However, the rapid growth of data centers increases the complexity of control and management processes. With the rapid adoption of SDN, the following critical challenges arise in large-scale data center networks: 1) extra packet delay on the separated control plane and 2) controller bottleneck in large-scale topology. We propose sRetor in this paper, a topology-description-language-based routing approach for regular data center networks that leverages data center networks’ regularity. sRetor aims to reduce the packet waiting time and controller workload in software-defined data center networking. We propose to move partial forwarding decision-making from the controller to switches to eliminate unnecessary control plane delay and reduce controller workload. Therefore the sRetor controller is only responsible for troubleshooting complicated failures and on-demand traffic scheduling. Our numerical and experimental results show that sRetor reduces the flow start time by over 68% and the fail-over time by over 84%.

Edge Cloud-Enabled Radio Resource Management for Co-Operative Automated Driving

Co-operative automated driving (CAD) is a key fifth generation mobile networks (5G) use case in which autonomous vehicles communicate over vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links requiring a wide range of rate-reliability-delay performance. One key 5G enabler for CAD sidelink radio resource management (RRM) in a multi-operator environment is the virtualization of RRM at the cloud server. This, however, is challenging due to an increase in control plane delay, signaling overhead and complexity. This paper introduces an edge cloud-enabled end-to-end vehicle-to-everything (V2X) architecture to support sidelink RRM in CAD scenarios. Analyzing the problem of a cloud-based sidelink resource allocation for CAD, a utility-based multi-objective optimization problem is described and is translated to three tasks: 1) a vehicle cluster formation as a solution to the clique partitioning problem ensuring vehicle reachability on the control plane, 2) an inter-cluster resource block pool (RB-pool) allocation as a solution to a max-min fairness problem and 3) an intra-cluster resource allocation. The proposed solution framework aims to achieve high modularity, low complexity and decouples cluster formation and RB-pool assignment from the intra-cluster optimum resource allocation, which may be performed on different time scales at different edge cloud entities. Simulation results in a realistic vehicular deployment show significant gains in terms of sidelink throughput and delay while maintaining high link quality.

Control plane delay minimization-based capacitated controller placement algorithm for SDN

Software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed as a new network paradigm which decouples control plane from data plane and provides flexible network management. In this paper, we consider the capacitated controller placement problem in SDN, which jointly determines the number, location, and the capacity matching strategy of SDN controllers. redTo stress the importance of control plane delay which is composed of both the transmission and processing delay between controllers and switches, and the inter-controller delay; we formulate control plane delay minimization problem subject to controller-switch association constraints, controller capacity constraints, etc. Since the formulated optimization problem is a complicated nonlinear integer programming problem which cannot be solved easily, we transform it into controller-switch association subproblem and controller capacity matching subproblem. To solve the controller-switch association subproblem, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on Dijkstra algorithm and K-means algorithm. Given the controller-switch association strategy, we then apply the Kuhn-Munkres (K-M) algorithm to solve the controller capacity matching subproblem and obtain the capacitated controller placement strategy. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Automated Inter-Domain Cut-Through Switching for the Future Internet

As the deployment of software-defined networks increases, so does the manageability of local and wide area networks. Designing intelligent solutions that respond to traffic changes automatically will soon become a mandatory requirement in production networks. In this paper, we focus on designing an intelligent control plane for the MobilityFirst Future Internet architecture. This architecture proposes novel mechanisms to replace the Internet Protocol to better support content delivery and mobility, such as hop-by-hop transfer, storage-aware routing and separation of identifiers and network addresses. In earlier work, we have argued that these mechanisms can be bypassed for certain data flows. Indeed, when there is no mobility involved, it is more convenient to implement cut-through switching at lower layers to bypass the routing mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an inter-domain framework capable of cut-through switching in MobilityFirst. The proposed framework is capable of adding and removing flows from tunnels automatically. It is also capable of creating inter-domain tunnels based on flow behavior and inter-domain latency. Our implementation experiments show that the control plane delay can be reduced by 75% when using inter-domain tunnels. Furthermore, the results also show how our framework needs fewer messages than current protocols such as label distribution protocol to setup intra-domain and inter-domain tunnels.

Improvements for DMM in SDN and Virtualization Based Mobile Network Architecture

The (r)evolution of wireless access infrastructure can be described as the convergence of the available radio communication systems towards a harmonized, more flexible and reconfigurable access system to match the current and upcoming demands. In recent years Softwarization and Virtualization technologies have moved from server and network domains to wireless domain and provides new perspectives of managing mobile networks functionalities. This paper provides evolution of the mobile network architecture in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and virtualization context and realizes it through the use of distribution of gateway function approach. Key improvements with proposed approach are to support efficient mobility management in heterogeneous access environments, remove the chains of IP preservation and optimal data path management according to application needs. A functional setup validates and assays the proposed evolution in terms of inter-system handover preparation, interruption and completion time relative to control plane delay requirements of the 5G networks.