Hybrid SDN Performance: Switching between Centralized and Distributed Modes under Unreliable Control Communication Channels

Software-defined networking generally assumes ideal control channels between controller and network nodes. This may not be the case in challenged environments that are becoming more common due to dense reduced-coverage 5G deployments use cases requiring cost-effective wireless transport networks. In this paper, we evaluate impact on performance of unreliable controller-to-node communication channels, propose a hybrid SDN (hSDN) solution switches centralized distributed operational modes depending conditions, under variety scenarios (e.g., link impairments or packet loss ratios) designed assess its limits. The results show proposed substantially improved aggregated throughput, particularly when channel ratios increased, while only showing slight increase average latency 28% throughput improvement for 20% losses). enables operation hard conditions which canonical would result nonoperational network.