Open flow-based multi-controller model for fault-tolerant and reliable control plane

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management. SDN which decouples the control and data planes of the network, is one of the most promising paradigms in the recent networking architectures. The SDN concept relies on a centralized controller. However, a centralized architecture faces the challenges of scalability, availability and fault-tolerance. OpenFlow (OF), the most commonly used southbound interface for SDN, makes the provision of using multiple controllers. In this paper, we propose FOIL, a new Fault-tolerant OpenFlow multi-controller model with ICMP-based lightweight inter-controller communication for achieving fault-tolerance and reliability in the SDN control plane.