Pareto-optimal resilient controller placement in SDN-based core networks

With the introduction of Software Defined Networking (SDN), the concept of an external and optionally centralized network control plane, i.e. controller, is drawing the attention of researchers and industry. A particularly important task in the SDN context is the placement of such external resources in the network. In this paper, we discuss important aspects of the controller placement problem with a focus on SDN-based core networks, including different types of resilience and failure tolerance. When several performance and resilience metrics are considered, there is usually no single best controller placement solution, but a trade-off between these metrics. We introduce our framework for resilient Pareto-based Optimal COntroller-placement (POCO) that provides the operator of a network with all Pareto-optimal placements. The ideas and mechanisms are illustrated using the Internet2 OS3E topology and further evaluated on more than 140 topologies of the Topology Zoo. In particular, our findings reveal that for most of the topologies more than 20% of all nodes need to be controllers to assure a continuous connection of all nodes to one of the controllers in any arbitrary double link or node failure scenario.