ASSESSMENT OF DISAGGREGATING THE SDN CONTROL PLANE

Current SDN controllers have been designed based on a monolithic approach that integrates all of services and applications into one single, huge program. The monolithic design of SDN controllers restricts programmers who build management applications to specific programming interfaces and services that a given SDN controller provides, making application development dependent on the controller, and thereby restricting portability of management applications across controllers. Furthermore, the monolithic approach means an SDN controller must be recompiled whenever a change is made, and does not provide an easy way to add new functionality or scale to handle large networks. To overcome the weaknesses inherent in the monolithic approach, the next generation of SDN controllers must use a distributed, microservice architecture that disaggregates the control plane by dividing the monolithic controller into a set of cooperative microservices. Disaggregation allows a programmer to choose a programming language that is appropriate for each microservice. In this dissertation, we describe steps taken towards disaggregating the SDN control plane, consider potential ways to achieve the goal, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. We propose a distributed architecture that disaggregates controller software into a small controller core and a set of cooperative microservices. In addition, we present a software defined network programming framework called Umbrella that provides a set of abstractions that programmers can use for writing of SDN management applications independent of NB APIs that SDN controllers provide. Finally, we present an intent-based network programming framework called OSDF to provide a high-level policy based API for programming of network devices using SDN.