A Fault-Tolerant and Consistent SDN Controller

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new paradigm that promises to enhance network flexibility and innovation. However, operators need to thoroughly assess its advantages and threats before they can implement it. Robustness and fault tolerance are among the main criteria to be considered in such assessment. The currently available SDN controllers offer different fault tolerance mechanisms, but there are still many open issues, especially regarding the trade-off between consistency and performance in a fault- tolerant SDN platform. In this paper, we describe existing fault-tolerant SDN controller solutions, and propose a mechanism to design a consistent and fault-tolerant Master-Slave SDN controller that is able to balance consistency and performance. The main objective of this paper is to bring the performance of an SDN Master-Slave controller as close as possible to the one offered by a single controller. This is obtained by introducing a simple replication scheme, combined with a consistency check and a correction mechanism, that influence the performance only during the few intervals when it is needed, instead of being active during the entire operation time.