DISCO: Distributed multi-domain SDN controllers

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is now envisioned for Wide Area Networks (WAN) and constrained overlay networks. Such networks require a resilient, scalable and easily extensible SDN control plane. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks. A DISCO controller manages its own network domain and communicates with other controllers to provide end-to-end network services. This east-west communication is based on a lightweight and highly manageable control channel. We implemented DISCO on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol and we evaluated it through an inter-domain topology disruption use case.