T-DCORAL: A Threshold-Based Dynamic Controller Resource Allocation for Elastic Control Plane in Software-Defined Data Center Networks

Abstract

The existing elastic control planes (ECPs) suffer from the immediacy and the computing overhead issues in software-defined data center networks (SD-DCNs). In this letter, we propose T-DCORAL which is a new ECP to mitigate both issues in SD-DCNs. T-DCORAL accelerates/decelerates the control plane by allocating a virtual CPU to controllers in runtime, whereas the existing ECPs resize the controller pool. As a result, T-DCORAL maximally reduces the latency to adjust the control plane from 46 s to 38 ms, the average CPU load by 22%, and the average rule installation time by 64.28%.