Constructing Robust Dissemination Paths in Centralized Control Network

With increasing development of forwarding network, the configuration and management of so many distributed devices has become a great challenge. This has motivated a renewed interest in centralized control of routing network. It enables the control-plane functionalities to be centralized on specific network devices in order to separate from packet forwarding. As a result of centralized control, the management information is delivered by dissemination paths between control element and forwarding engines. The construction of dissemination paths is a key component of centralized control, which must be independent of data-plane convergence. Existing approaches are not quite suitable for centralized control network, thus distinct protocols are required. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to construct robust dissemination paths for centralized control network. We describe the basic procedure of construction with several reasonable optimizations. We also identify how this approach guarantees the robustness of the constructed path, and demonstrate why the approach is operational, flexible and light weighted. The approach can be easily incorporated into any centralized control network systems as an integrated module with minor modifications, thus leveraging their abilities.