Controller failover for SDN enterprise networks

In SDN network based on OpenFlow a controller performs logically centralized control of enterprise network infrastructure, network policies, and data flows. At the same time the controller is a single point of failure which can cause a very serious problem (e.g. network outage) for network reliability and production use cases. To address this problem, we consider different active/standby strategies to provide a controller failover in case of controller failure. We propose a high-available controller (HAC) architecture, which allows to deploy a high-availability control plane for enterprise networks. We develop a HAC prototype to demonstrate the efficiency of our solution and also describe initial experimental results.