Scalable Multi-Controller Coordination in Periplus via Border-Switch Forwarding Graphs

Abstract

In-band SDN control planes, where control traffic shares the data-plane infrastructure, suit wide-area, resource-constrained deployments -- such as rural backbones -- that cannot afford a dedicated control network. Partitioning such a network across multiple controllers improves scalability but raises a coordination challenge that in-band designs have largely ignored: controllers must discover one another and exchange state in-band, and switches must recover when their controller fails, all without forwarding state that grows with the number of controllers. This paper presents the multi-controller coordination plane of Periplus, an in-band control plane whose single-controller design is developed in a companion paper. Periplus controllers discover their neighbors through Controller Advertisement (C-Adv) messages and build inter-controller routes incrementally: each border switch inserts a partial forwarding graph covering only the next domain, so per-controller forwarding state is confined to border switches and never distributed across the interior of an intermediate domain. The same C-Adv mechanism reattaches a switch to a surviving controller after a controller failure. We evaluate a Ryu-based implementation in Mininet, including a 96-switch, 5-controller scenario. Per-switch flow-table state is set by a switch's role rather than by network size -- interior occupancy stays constant as controllers are added -- partitioning scales bootstrap to networks of around a hundred switches, and inter-controller discovery converges within seconds. The design needs no switch-firmware modifications: it runs on stock Open vSwitch, using only its built-in Nicira extensions for Network Service Header (NSH) encapsulation.