Master Controller Election Mechanism Based on Controller Cluster in Software Defined Optical Networks

In large-scale software defined optical networks (SDON) with tens of thousands of network elements, multiple controllers have to be deployed simultaneously, because single controller cannot bear too many service requests. Then, survivability of controller becomes an important issue for SDON. Controller cluster deployed with master and slave controllers is considered as an effective solution for this issue. A SDON controller cluster architecture is given in the paper, based on which a master controller election mechanism (MCEM) is proposed. Simulation results show that MCEM can get better performance in terms of operation time, traffic loads and fault tolerance compared with Paxos algorithm.