Towards a Resilient Openflow Channel Through MPTCP

In the recent years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the way networks are engineered, making them more flexible, programmable and dynamic. SDN advocates for the centralization of control functionalities in a central node, the so-called controller. This entity has a wide view of the entire network, including the topology, facilitating the management and decreasing the complexity. However, the existence of a single entity running the complete control plane constitutes a single point of failure, thus triggering the need of improving the resiliency and reliability of the controller and the connection between the control and the data plane. This paper presents a solution for the improvement of the resiliency and the reliability on the OpenFlow channel through the use of multipath TCP (MPTCP). The proposed solution is based on the simultaneous use of in-band and out-of-band paths for the OpenFlow control channel, and includes a first experimental evaluation of the performance gains that can be achieved.