Improving Software Defined Network controllers in a multi-vendor environment

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm with the potential to foster innovation through programmable networks. SDNs are characterized by the separation of control and data planes where, in a logically centralized controller, it's possible to make routing decisions on behalf of forwarding elements. For this, there are different protocols proposed and used like Open Flow, Forward and Control Element Separation (FORCES), Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP), Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), and Interface to Routing System (IRS), among others. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one such protocol that enables the network programmability promised by SDNs. The controllers used in BGP as control plane protocols leverage RESTCONF (RFC 8040) as management plane protocol to interact with physical routers, switches, and network service firewalls. Therefore, the aim of this work is to improve the performance of SDN controllers using BGP enabling a multi-vendor environment without requiring infrastructure upgrade showcasing how interoperability can be achieved. The proposed system is implemented using OpenDaylight controllers. The performance of the prototype is evaluated using Latency, Throughput, CPU consumption, and TTL (Time to Live). Based on the simulation results it is observed that the SDN controllers that use BGP show average throughput of 49.6 Gbps, maximum latency of 7 μs, and average CPU consumption 89% and maximum TTL value of 600 msec. The overall performance of the proposed system shows better results when compared with previous works.