A Wireless and Distributed Control Plane Network for Data Centers

Description

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that decouples thesoftware that controls a network from the devices that implement network functions,which is the separation of the network control plane from the data plane. The controlplane usually uses an independent network for communication between the controllerand the switches, which is physically separated from the data plane network. However,building an additional wired network for control plane in a data center involves complexconstruction work of cabling installation, which hinders the wide deployment of SDN indata centers. The principal goal this project is to investigate the current wireless andSDN technologies and develop a wireless solution for adopting SDN for data centernetworks. This project consists of three major tasks: 1) Develop a clustering algorithm todivide the switches of a data center into clusters and place a WR in each cluster, suchthat the number of WRs used to cover all switches is minimized and the control trafficdemand of each switch is met. 2) Design a wireless backbone network for each domainand design resource allocation algorithms for the wireless links, such that the WRswithin the domain are all connected to the domain controller and the aggregated controltraffic demand over wireless links is met. 3) Design an efficient distributed scheme formultiple domain controllers in the data center, such that global congestion control andload balancing can be achieved through the collaborations among the controllers.