Traffic Engineering in the Peer-to-Peer SDN

Software Defined Network (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm which separates the control plane from the data forwarding plane. The centralized controller provides the global view of the distributed network states for user applications. However, the scalability of SDN is subject to the delay, the capacity of the controller, the bandwidth of the control channel, and other issues. To solve this problem, peer-to-peer (p2p) SDN, where multiple independent controllers control their own networks and these controllers exchange the only required state changing events, is an emerging control plane architecture. In this paper, we focus on the traffic engineering in the p2p SDN administrated by one operator. We first identify some fundamental challenges (i.e., path aggregation for advertisement, routing loop, overhead) for the traffic engineering in the p2p SDN. Then we proposed a novel protocol exchanging the required network information to enable the traffic engineering between neighboring SDN domains. The experiments show that our protocol can achieve nearly same performance (about 98%) as the one with God's knowledge (the full information of the whole network). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to investigate the traffic engineering problem in the p2p SDN.