Architecture for a distributed openflow controller

Considering the modern internet traffic rates, the network architecture is of particular importance as the running services itself. On the other hand, due to the increasing complexity and black-box structure of the available networking hardware (switches, routers, etc.), the necessary network innovation imposed by the running services becomes infeasible in practice. The software-defined networking notion introduced to solve this problem and one of its emerging and powerful implementations, the OpenFlow protocol, advocate the idea of providing the control and data paths in separate planes. A network operating system running on this control plane, is anticipated to provide necessary measures for scalability and reliability in order to stand against the gigantic traffic pumped by the network. In this paper, we propose a distributed OpenFlow network operating system built with necessary scalability and reliability qualifications without requiring any changes to the existing OpenFlow protocol and networking equipment.