SDN-RAS is an industry research project between Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd and Prof. Tran-Gia Informationstechnik GmbH.
Project Summary:
The inflexibility in management of today’s networks led to the development of new network paradigms such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). By separating the network control and data plane and logically centralizing the control on the so called SDN controller, SDN brings more and flexible control of networks. The communication between data plane and control plane is realized by standardized protocols, e.g. OpenFlow. The increased flexibility of SDN enables a more efficient operation and a faster and precise reaction to occurring network failures. The fine granular, but yet scalable mechanisms SDN controller are able to provide, allow for a network load of almost 100% without reducing the overall quality of service in the network.
Relying on a well performing and reliable control plane, the latest SDN controllers utilize a physically but yet logically centralized architecture, in order to provide a reliable and scalable network operation. This architecture, however, comes with a new challenge: the synchronization of the global knowledge amongst controller instances. As the synchronized global knowledge is an important factor of these systems, often a trade-off between control plane resilience and the reliability of the global state has to be found.
The project focuses on the identification and analysis of the top reliability, availability and serviceability challenges of current SDN mechanisms, protocols, and architectures.