Priority-based Scheduling Policy for OpenFlow Control Plane

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network paradigm, allowing administrators to manage networks through central controllers by separating a control plane from a data plane. So, one or more controllers must locate outside switches. However, this separation may cause delay problems between controllers and switches. In this thesis, we therefore propose a Priority-based Scheduling policy for OpenFlow (PSO). The purpose of PSO is to give a higher priority for OpenFlow control messages in the in-band control network. Furthermore, PSO provides different priorities for OpenFlow control messages, based on contents/services (data traffic types) and/or customers for both in-band and out-of-band control network. The PSO is based on packet prioritization mechanisms in both OpenFlow switches and controllers. In addition, we have prototyped and experimented on PSO using a network simulator (ns-3). From the experimental results, the PSO can help the data flow with high priority acquire forwarding rules with lower delay under network congestion in control links (Normalized Load > 0.8), comparing to traditional OpenFlow.

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