Flexible distributed control plane deployment

For large-scale programmable networks, flexible deployment of distributed control planes is essential for service availability and performance. However, existing approaches only focus on placing controllers whereas the consequent control traffic is often ignored. In this paper, we propose a black-box optimization framework offering the additional steps for quanti-fying the effect of the consequent control traffic when deploying a distributed control plane. Evaluating different implementations of the framework over real-world topologies shows that close to optimal solutions can be achieved. Moreover, experiments indicate that running a method for controller placement without considering the control traffic, cause excessive bandwidth usage (worst cases varying between 20.1%-50.1% more) and congestion, compared to our approach.