Routing and State Distribution Trade-Offs in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) introduces programability into the network forwarding plane and simultaneously enables architectural refactoring of the routing control plane. In this work, we present two complementary studies leveraging the opportunities presented by SDN. First, in the context of internet router architectures in Section II, we propose leveraging OpenFlow forwarding information base (FIB) programability to employ routing table aggregation techniques to reduce FIB memory requirements. Second, in Section III, we investigate a fundamental network design choice introduced by SDN: How centralized vs. distributed to build the routing control plane and what are the crucial considerations when designing a distributed SDN control plane application?