DockFlex: A Docker-based SDN Distributed Control Plane Architecture

Abstract

Software Defined Networking is changing entirely the network architecture and moving it forward to make it more flexible, scalable, fast, and highly available. Recently, the idea of containerization is becoming more present in the industry as well as in the academia and has managed to solve many issues linked to virtual machines. SDN has begun with a centralized architecture with a single controller that is responsible for the entire underlying network, thereafter, this solution has shown many overall performance related problems. After that, the need has raised for distributed SDN networks to obstruct the limitation of performance, security, and scalability. In this paper, we try to take advantage of both notions already addressed, the containerization concept, as well as the control plane distributed SDN networks concept and propose DockFlex, a distributed control plane Docker-based SDN architecture that inherits all the features of a classic SDN architecture and, furthermore, enables a highly manageable and orchestrated multi-controller SDN network that can be established easily via the cloud. Moreover, we suggest a highly customizable implementation of the DockFlex architecture, which uses native Docker-based tools and third-party solutions.