An investigation into the use of software-defined networking controllers

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is rapidly gaining acceptance and use in terrestrial networks but little research has been done to apply it to aerial networks. This paper details an investigation on seven open-source controllers using a specific set of criteria based on the characteristics of both aerial and terrestrial networks. It was determined that Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and OpenDaylight (ODL) are the two best foundations for large or complex use cases. It was further discovered that ODL with default parameters can generate extreme amounts of traffic during controller failure and recovery and reacts more slowly than ONOS under the same conditions. This paper also documents a new algorithm created by the author for use in aerial networks that takes advantage of their small size to leverage a highly parallelizable problem representation and solution. This algorithm solves the problem of deciding which directional antennas to align to form connections and efficiently processes frequent updates while generating an exact solution for the optimal path.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Anderson, DeJuan M

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lizhong Zheng and Hammad Iqbal.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112893

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/112893