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Towards an elastic distributed SDN controller

Published: 16 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Distributed controllers have been proposed for Software Defined Networking to address the issues of scalability and reliability that a centralized controller suffers from. One key limitation of the distributed controllers is that the mapping between a switch and a controller is statically configured, which may result in uneven load distribution among the controllers. To address this problem, we propose ElastiCon, an elastic distributed controller architecture in which the controller pool is dynamically grown or shrunk according to traffic conditions and the load is dynamically shifted across controllers. We propose a novel switch migration protocol for enabling such load shifting, which conforms with the Openflow standard. We also build a prototype to demonstrate the efficacy of our design.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HotSDN '13: Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
August 2013
182 pages
ISBN:9781450321785
DOI:10.1145/2491185
  • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
    October 2013
    595 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/2534169
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 16 August 2013

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Author Tags

  1. data center networks
  2. software-defined networks

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  • Research-article

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SIGCOMM'13
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SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference
August 16, 2013
Hong Kong, China

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HotSDN '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 84 submissions, 45%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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