Control-data plane intelligence trade-off in SDN

Abstract

With the decoupling of network control and data planes, the upcoming Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm advocates better network control and manageability. It introduces logical centralized control, network programmability and abstraction of underlying infrastructure from network services and applications. With global visibility of network state and central control that eases real time monitoring, policy alterations etc., it certainly enhances network security inherently. However, the separation of planes opens up new challenges like denial of service (DoS) attack, saturation attack, man-in-the middle attack and so on. Many of the issues of controller availability, controller-switch communication delay and scalability can be solved separately by distributed controllers, out-of-band communication links and parallelization respectively. Control-data plane intelligence trade-off has the potential to solve all of these. It increases controller availability, reduces latency for traffic engineering & decision making, and improves controller scalability. Moreover, control-data plane intelligence trade-off enables the control-data plane communication to be more secure. This will tremendously offload the processing load on the controller. We present how to realize control-data plane intelligence tradeoff extending OpenFlow.