POCO-PLC: Enabling dynamic pareto-optimal resilient controller placement in SDN networks

Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained a lot of attention. The paradigm shift towards centralized architectures with a separation of control plane and data plane is expected for several use cases, including amongst others core communication networks, data center networks, or Network Function Virtualization (NFV). An important issue during SDN deployment is the placement of controllers in the network. The first to address this topic were Heller et al. [3] followed by other researchers who added different resilience issues into their observations. An overview on relevant publications can be found in our previous work [1], where we also introduced our POCO toolset. Here, a powerful and user friendly POCO-PLC toolset is provided and presented that facilitates the analysis and optimization of the controller placement in SDN networks under dynamic conditions. A general overview on the functionality and architecture of POCO-PLC is given. Then, possible use cases enabled by POCO-PLC is indicated.