How Software Aging affects SDN: A view on the controllers

Software-Defined Networking proposes a new paradigm by separating the control plane from the data plane. The control plane's main responsibility is deployed in a centralized component called SDN controller. Therefore, the SDN based network becomes dependent on a single functional entity (although it may have multiple instances) in order to accomplish its routing and policy rules. The SDN controller is vulnerable to degradation due to a well-known phenomenon called Software Aging. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that assesses the impacts of software aging on current implementation of SDN controllers. We show that such a phenomenon must not be neglected in future software architecture designs and implementations.