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IRIS-HiSA: Highly Scalable and Available Carrier-Grade SDN Controller Cluster

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Abstract

As software defined networking (SDN) extends its applications to carrier-grade networks, the need for high scalability and availability of a SDN controller is becoming increasingly important. Although existing works have shown the feasibility of a distributed controller, the switches in the data plane are required to know some of the internal specifics such as the IP addresses of the individual controller instances. This constraint increases the operational complexity as the number of controller instances increases. In this paper, we propose a distributed controller cluster architecture called IRIS-HiSA. The main goal is to support seamless load balancing and failover with horizontal scalability, as is done in existing works, but one of the distinguishing features of IRIS-HiSA is to provide transparency to the switches in the data plane. Thus, the switches do not need to know the internal details of the controller cluster, and they simply access it in the same way a single controller is accessed. In addition to proving seamless load balancing and a failover, a performance evaluation is conducted to analyze the high scalability in which the throughput of the flow setup is proportionally increased with the number of controller instances.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Jisoo Shin & Sunhee Yang

  2. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, Chungbuk, 28644, Republic of Korea

    Taehong Kim

  3. Amazon, Seattle, WA, USA

    Byungjoon Lee

Authors
  1. Jisoo Shin
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  2. Taehong Kim
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  3. Byungjoon Lee
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  4. Sunhee Yang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Taehong Kim.

Additional information

This work was partially supported by Institute for Information, Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP). (B0101-16-0233, Smart Networking Core Technology Development), and Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2016R1D1A1B03933007).

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Shin, J., Kim, T., Lee, B. et al. IRIS-HiSA: Highly Scalable and Available Carrier-Grade SDN Controller Cluster. Mobile Netw Appl 22, 894–905 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-017-0853-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-017-0853-6

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