Centralized Trust-Based In-Band Control for SDN Control Channel

Abstract

In SDN architecture, the control channel between the control and data planes is extremely significant, which has two connection modes: out-of-band mode and in-band mode. For in-band mode, the key to the establishment of SDN control channel is how to forward in-band control traffic in the data plane (control traffic: traffic between controllers and switches). In almost all the existing implementation of the in-band SDN networks, the forwarding of in-band control traffic in the data plane depends on distributed Layer 2 switching that cannot respond to the network state change immediately. In this article, we propose a Centralized Trust-based In-Band (CTIB) control mechanism for SDN in-band control channel. Then based on CTIB control mechanism, we design CTIB routing algorithm to select the most trusted control path for each data plane switch in order to improve the QoS (Quality of Service) of in-band control traffic. Furthermore, we implement CTIB control mechanism in an in-band SDN network and carry out several experiments to test the QoS of the in-band control traffic. The results indicate that there is a huge improvement of in-band control traffic QoS when using CTIB control mechanism compared to the distributed Layer 2 switching. INDEX TERMS SDN, centralized in-band controlling, QoS of in-band control traffic, trust-based routing.

A Comprehensive Survey of In-Band Control in SDN: Challenges and Opportunities

“…ML can potentially be used to solve many problems in networking, including design, implementation, performance, and verification [109]. ML can be applied to improve in-band connectivity in many situations, such as finding the path with the highest QoS [69], finding disjoint paths for MPTCP [63,68], or improving network security by detecting a malicious node [65]. The use of ML for routing optimisation in SDN can be found in this survey [109].…”

“…Fan et al [69] propose a centralised routing solution to improve the QoS of in-band control traffic in terms of bandwidth. They analyse the in-band control traffic, finding out that it is periodic and needs a very small bandwidth: around 120 kbits every 5 s. Hence, they place the in-band connection on the path with the most available bandwidth.…”

UASTrustChain: A Decentralized Blockchain- Based Trust Monitoring Framework for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems

“…The UAVs form different clusters where the central unit can detect the malicious agents when at most, one compromised agent in each cluster exists. Fan et al [20] proposed another fully centralized trust management system to choose the most trusted paths for data transfer in SDN network. Authors considered the network as a multi-agent system, and looked to the switches and routers as the agents.…”