An Efficient Wireless Control Plane for Software Defined Networking in Data Center Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has re-defined the way data center networks are deployed and functioned. The ability to separate the control plane and data plane has led to simpler design and easier management. In SDN, the data plane and control plane are separately managed, so building an additional wired network to connect the control plane and the data plane can lead to a high cabling complexity. This paper proposes an end-to-end end wireless control plane architecture for SDN-enabled data center networks. In the proposed architecture, the switches form clusters that are wirelessly connected to the controller via Access Points (APs) and Relay Nodes (RNs). The switches use 2.4/5 GHz band to connect with the APs, whereas the APs and the RNs are connected to controller using 60 GHz band. We have presented an analytical model to derive achievable data rates in our wireless control plane. We have also proposed two algorithms that allows an optimal number of cluster size of the switches to be connected with the Controller via minimum number to APs/RNs such that the control traffic demands of the switches is guaranteed in interference constrained environment. Through extensive simulations, the results of our propose architecture shows that the cabling complexity in the control plane is reduced to zero and additional switches may be easily added in SDN data center. Thus, a pure wireless solution for building a control plane in a data center network is feasible.