Reliable Control and Data Planes for Softwarized Networks

Driven by the requirement of increasing performance and flexibility, networks are being softwarized by paradigms such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). These solutions reduce the complexity and the specialization of hardware devices, by extracting the inherently distributed control plane of forwarding network elements such as switches and routers, to a logically centralized control plane (referred as controller in SDN). The control plane acts as a broker between the network applications (e.g. monitoring, traffic engineering) and the data plane (i.e. physical network infrastructure). For scalability and robustness, the logically centralized control plane is implemented by physically distributing different controllers throughout the network. This chapter presents different solutions to increase the reliability of both planes: data and control planes. The reliability of the data plane can be increased by considering survivable virtual network embedding solutions. This chapter proposes a survivable embedding against single and double failures at either links or nodes. Furthermore, in order to provide a programmable and resilient data plane, BPFabric has been proposed for SDN which supports high performance functions suitable for detecting attacks. On the other hand, the reliability of the control plane applied to SDN can be addressed by considering enhanced controller placement solutions providing redundancy against uncorrelated as well as targeted failures while coping with latency and capacity requirements. Furthermore, a solution to increase the security and robustness of the control channel is also addressed in this chapter.