On the placement of management and control functionality in software defined networks

In order to support reactive and adaptive operations, Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based management and control frameworks call for decentralized solutions. A key challenge to consider when deploying such solutions is to decide on the degree of distribution of the management and control functionality. In this paper, we develop an approach to determine the allocation of management and control entities by designing two algorithms to compute their placement. The algorithms rely on a set of input parameters which can be tuned to take into account the requirements of both the network infrastructure and the management applications to execute in the network. We evaluate the influence of these parameters on the configuration of the resulting management and control planes based on real network topologies and provide guidelines regarding the settings of the proposed algorithms.