Design considerations for managing wide area software defined networks
Reaz Ahmed, Raouf Boutaba · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2014
SDN has the potential to simplify network configuration and reduce management complexity. In today¿s networks control and forwarding functions are tightly coupled and embedded within each switch/router. SDN, in contrast, accumulates the control functionality in one or more dedicated network entities called controllers, which provide a unified interface to configure and control the network. Packet forwarding, on the other hand, remains the responsibility of the switches/routers. Many datacenter networks have benefited from the abstraction provided by SDN. However, in a Wide Area Network (WAN) a single controller becomes a performance bottleneck. Multiple controller solutions are proposed as a natural consequence. In this article we present the requirements, design alternatives, and a possible management architecture for a single administrative domain WA-SDN. We also discuss the functional components that should be present in a multi-controller architecture for managing WA-SDN deployments.