Towards a Resilient Openflow Channel Through MPTCP

In the recent years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the way networks are engineered, making them more flexible, programmable and dynamic. SDN advocates for the centralization of control functionalities in a central node, the so-called controller. This entity has a wide view of the entirenetwork, including the topology, facilitating the management and decreasing the complexity. However, the existence of a single entity running the complete control plane constitutes a single point of failure, thus triggering the need of improving the resiliency and reliability of the controller and the connectionbetween the control and the data plane. This paper presents a solution for the improvement of the resiliency and the reliability on the OpenFlow channel through the use of multipath TCP (MPTCP). The proposed solutionis based on the simultaneous use of in-band and out-of-band paths for the OpenFlow control channel, and includes a first experimental evaluation of the performance gains that can be achieved.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586) and the EU H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER Project (grant num. 761536