Enhancing Control Model to Ease Off Centralized Control of Flow-Based SDNs

This paper shows our design of a hybrid control model for flow-based networks. There are many research efforts related to the flow-based networks, however, our work was inspired by OpenFlow technology. Specially that OpenFlow was counted as a key enabler technology for Software Defined Networks (SDN). Thus, it has a great potential to improve the current Internet by providing new functionalities and a new control scheme and thus enabling new smarter applications to be created. However, there have been some debates regarding the scalability of the OpenFlow´s controller, due to its dependency on a centralized controller. Our study aims to provide flow-based networks with a hybrid control model that combines both central control and distributed control, in order to provide a more relaxed control. This is done by designing two new features, network equipment to equipment flow installation, and a new type of proactive flows. Through which we aim to relieve some of the load off the central controller, make flow-based networks more self-aware, and provide a method to support flows with strict timing requirements. This hybrid control model is proposed as a step forward towards encouraging a wider adoption of flow-based networks as an easily programmed network that holds a great potential as a future Internet technology.