Reliability and Scalability Issues in Software Defined Network Frameworks

Software Defined Network (SDN) structure has been proposed for its flexibility in deployment and management. As an implementation of SDN structure, OpenFlow protocol decouples data plane and control plane so that flexible and programmable installation and management of forwarding rules are allowed. However, on the other hand, the decoupled structure raises additional computational and network resources consumption that even may lead to fatal disasters. In this study, we examine the issues of reliability and scalability of SDN under disaster scenarios on a GENI test-bed. Observations from our experiments show that more attention should be paid to improve the reliability and scalability of SDN and its frameworks.