Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article

Redundancy Method for Highly Available OpenFlow Controller

Authors:
Keisuke Kuroki
Masaki Fukushima
Michiaki Hayashi
Nobutaka Matsumoto

Keywords: OpenFlow; controller; redundancy.

Abstract:
OpenFlow is an important element for achieving Software Defined Networking (SDN) and is expected to be an enabler that solves the problems of today’s network. Thanks to the centralized management with OpenFlow, agile network operation can be achieved with flexible programmability; however, the centralized management implies a significant impact of any outages of the OpenFlow controller. Hence, a high availability technology is indispensable for building the OpenFlow controller. To achieve the highly available system, we have to consider extraordinary events (e.g., power outage) affecting the entire data center as well as anticipated server failures within a local system. In this paper, we review the issue in using the conventional redundancy method for OpenFlow controllers. Based on this observation, we propose a redundancy method considering both local and global (i.e., inter datacenter) recoveries using the multiple-controllers capability that is defined in OpenFlow switch specification version 1.2 and later. The proposed redundancy scheme eliminates virtual IP address-based redundancy and frontend server causing limitation of performance scalability, while it achieves competitive role change and failover times.

Pages: 114 to 123

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652