A database oriented management for asynchronous and consistent reconfiguration in Software-Defined Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach to manage the whole network flexibly by decoupling the control plane and the forwarding plane. While forwarding elements can be managed by a unified control, complexity arisen from the network size and scalability regarding the increase of the control traffic are notable problems. To deal with events of network reconfiguration that occur asynchronously and change frequently with intervals shorter than hours, a controller has to continue to asynchronously update the configuration of the whole network. However, it is hard to maintain the consistency of the configuration of the whole network because it needs to manage a huge amount of network information and to deal with user requests that occur asynchronously. In this paper, we propose a database oriented management for asynchronous reconfiguration to achieve the consistency of configuration in SDN. We design a structure of the database to store network information and two functional components. Finally, we adopt our management system to an OpenFlow-based network, and validate that our system can manage and control an OpenFlow network via the database.