An East-West interface for distributed SDN control plane: Implementation and evaluation

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new concept within the networking field that allows programmability, automation, agility of services, and innovation using physically or logically centralized controllers. However, there is a lack of SDN in broadly distributed domains, where each domain has its own Controller. In this paper, we propose and implement a Communication Interface for Distributed Control plane (CIDC) that allows synchronization, the exchange of notifications as well as services between multiple distributed SDN Controllers. We have implemented distributed services such as Firewall and Load Balancer to improve the security and overall quality of service in distributed SDN architecture. The proposal for this research was evaluated in real wide-area network topologies, and the results show the feasibility of our CIDC in term of performance compared to the previous models based on a set of controllers arranged in a cluster.