A Research on High-Performance SDN Controller

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new programmable network construction technology that enables centrally management and control, which is considered to be the future evolution trend of networks. A modularized carrier-grade SDN controller according to the characteristics of carrier-grade networks is designed and proposed, resolving the problem of controlling large-scale networks of carrier. The modularized architecture offers the system flexibility, scalability and stability. Functional logic of modules and core modules, such as link discovery module and topology module, are designed to meet the carrier's need. Static memory allocation, multi-threads technique and stick-package processing are used to improve the performance of controller, which is C programming language based. Processing logic of the communication mechanism of the controller is introduced, proving that the controller conforms to the OpenFlow specification and has a good interaction with OpenFlow-based switches. A controller cluster management system is used to interact with controllers through the east-west interface in order to manage large-scale networks. Furthermore, the effectiveness and high performance of the work in this paper has been verified by the testing using Cbench testing program. Moreover, the SDN controller we proposed has been running in China Telecom's Cloud Computing Key Laboratory, which showed the good results is achieved.