cCluster: A highly scalable and elastic OpenFlow control plane

OpenFlow has been widely used in Software Defined Networking (SDN) to customize data plane behaviors through policies given by a logically centralized controller. The centralized control plane design brings the potential of simplifying network management, but it also raises scalability concern for large-scale networks. In this paper, we aim to build a highly scalable and flexible OpenFlow control plane. We propose the design and implementation of cCluster, which leverage the parallelism of cluster to balance the control plane load. Compared with existing solutions, cCluster can achieve better scalability, and can enable elastic management. We evaluated the scalability and response time of cCluster using Mininet, and our results show that cCluster can serve thousands of flow entries simultaneously, with only slightly latency penalty.