| Abstract |
Distributed software-defined networking (SDN), consisting of multiple inter-connected network domains, each managed by one SDN controller, is an emerging networking architecture that offers balanced centralized control and distributed operations. In this work, we study such network architecture from both experimental and analytical perspectives. Specifically, we implement a wireless SDN multi-controller system, where the controllers communicate to each other and to data plane-devices through WiFi multi-hop links. We measure the corresponding traffic delay and overheads. The results reveal the sensitivity of delay to the location of controllers and the magnitude of inter-controller and controller-node overheads. Such experiments highlight the feasibility of distributed SDN and the overheads of their operations including the overheads due to synchronizations. Therefore, it is challenging to achieve full status synchronizations among controllers in a real system. In this regard, we analyze and quantify the performance enhancement of distributed SDN architectures, which is influenced by intra-/inter-domain synchronization levels and network structural properties. Based on a generic network model, we establish analytical methods for performance estimation under four canonical inter-domain synchronization scenarios. Specifically, we first derive an asymptotic expression to quantify how dominating structural and synchronization-related parameters affect the performance metric. We then provide performance analytics for an important family of networks, where all links are of equal preference for path constructions. Finally, we establish fine-grained performance metric expressions for networks with dynamically adjusted link preferences. Our theoretical results reveal how network performance is related to synchronization levels and intra-/inter-domain connections, the accuracy of which is confirmed by simulations based on both real and synthetic networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work quantifying the performance of distributed SDN analytically, which provides fundamental guidance for future SDN protocol designs and performance estimation. |