Scalability and Resilience of Software-Defined Networking: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews the scalability and resilience challenges in Software-Defined Networking, focusing on control overhead, single points of failure, and security threats, and discusses potential solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SDN's scalability and resilience issues, highlighting current challenges and research directions.

Findings

Identifies control overhead as a key scalability issue.

Highlights single points of failure affecting network resilience.

Discusses security threats like malicious attacks.

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows to control the available network resources by an intelligent and centralized authority in order to optimize traffic flows in a flexible manner. However, centralized control may face scalability issues when the network size or the number of traffic flows increases. Also, a centralized controller may form a single point of failure, thereby affecting the network resilience. This article provides an overview of SDN that focuses on (1) scalability concerning the increased control overhead faced by a central controller, and (2) resiliency in terms of protection against controller failure, network topology failure and security in terms of malicious attacks.