title: Leveraging master-slave OpenFlow controller arrangement to improve control plane resiliency in SD-EONs.
abstract: In this paper, we study how to improve the control plane resiliency of software-defined elastic optical networks (SD-EONs) and design a master-slave OpenFlow (OF) controller arrangement. Specifically, we introduce two OF controllers (OF-Cs), i.e., the master and slave OF-Cs, and make them work in a collaborative way to protect the SD-EON against controller failures. We develop a controller communication protocol (CCP) to facilitate the cooperation of the two OF-Cs. With the CCP, the master OF-C (M-OF-C) can synchronize network status to the slave OF-C (S-OF-C) in real time, while S-OF-C can quickly detect the failure of M-OF-C and take over the network control and management (NC&M) tasks timely to avoid service disruption. We implement the proposed framework in an SD-EON control plane testbed built with high-performance servers, and perform NC&M experiments with different network failure scenarios to demonstrate its effectiveness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system can restore services in both the data and control planes of SD-EON jointly while maintaining relatively good scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that realizes control plane resiliency in SD-EONs.
authors.forename: Xiaoliang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Shoujiang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Cen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Daoyun
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Wenshuang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Zuqing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhu