Decentralized Collaborative Flow Monitoring in Distributed SDN Control-Planes

The Software-defined Networking paradigm became widely accepted in academia as well as the industry in the last decade. The logically centralized control-plane provides simple mechanisms to support efficient monitoring as proposed in a plethora of works recently. However, existing works simplify the control-plane to a single entity whereas it is proven that the control-plane must be implemented physically distributed. To this end, we lately proposed DistTM, a system to increase the efficiency while monitoring flows in distributed control-planes by eliminating redundant measurements of shared flows. The system is based on a centralized coordinator that introduces a single-point-of-failure and is vulnerable to network partitioning. To overcome this shortage, we propose a distributed algorithm to assign redundant measurement responsibilities to single controllers and share information among controllers in the work in hand. In an evaluation, we show that we decrease the number of measurements strongly and improve the load fairness among controllers through the collaboration of networks.