Distributed Control Plane for 4D Architecture

We explore the design of a logically centralized but physically distributed control plane for 4D architecture. 4D architecture proposes centralization of network-wide decision making state and logic in a logical control plane to ease the management complexity of data networks. However, the current design implementations of the 4D control plane are limited to physical centralization. We argue that exploration of physically distributed control plane designs would be beneficial to the scalability and practical deployment of the architecture, and present design guidelines for different routing strategies that can be used to optimize the deployment of distributed 4D architecture.