Distributed Traffic Engineering for Multi-Domain Software Defined Networks

• Published in: 2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) pp. 492 - 502
• Main Authors: Zhao, Laiping, Hua, Jingyu, Liu, Yangyang, Qu, Wenyu, Zhang, Suohao, Zhong, Sheng
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2019
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Channel allocation; Decentralized control; Distributed Control Plane; Network topology; Reliability; Routing; Software Defined Networks; Topology; Traffic Engineering
• ISSN: 2575-8411
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDCS.2019.00056

The increasing scale of software defined networks (SDN) raises the requirement of distributed control plane, for providing scalable, reliable and high performance network management capabilities. In particular, the flat design of distributed control plane enables the management of networks with multiple independent domains that are incapable of deploying a root controller. However, it is very difficult to avoid policy conflicts between multiple controllers in flat plane due to the lack of arbitration. In this paper, we address the problem of traffic engineering in a flat control plane, and design a distributed traffic engineering algorithm, called DisTE, which can provide max-min fair bandwidth allocation for flows and maximize the resource utilization, using a fully distributed arbitration mechanism. DisTE also preserves the local topology of each domain using the topology aggregation method, and supports consistency by multiple rounds of synchronizations. We examine four strategies for determining the synchronization timings, and find that linearly decreasing interval method provides a better trade-off between network utilization and time costs. Experiments on a 717-switches 5-domain network topology demonstrate that DisTE could drive the link utilization ratio to more than 93%, and reduce up to 95% convergence time at cost of 3% relative error on fairness, compared to the centralized approach.