A software-defined network (SDN) enables agile network control and configuration as well as shortens the network function deployment time. Despite the projected benefits of an SDN, the abstractions toward the remote and centralized control tend to impose excessive control traffic overhead in order for the controller to acquire global network visibility as well as extend the legacy network’s inaccurate and unreliable management problems into the control plane. In addition, many recent SDNs facilitate multiple management pillars (such as customized interfaces and protocols) so that user applications can directly communicate to the data plane to measure and monitor specific information. Not only logical control centralization, but also virtualization of the underlying computing and network resources add demands of more flexible and programmable monitoring functions per the virtual domain. A complex combination of multiple and heterogeneous management channels introduces the significant scalability, control tuning, and reliability problems in SDN. In this paper, to address the above control and management problems, we propose a highly scalable and reliable SDN control and management architecture, called IRIS Control and Management (IRIS-CoMan). It builds an intelligent agent based hybrid SDN architecture by providing a control and management abstraction and filtering layer. It serves an essential component for the reliable, scalable, and secure SDN deployment. We present design, implementation, deployment, and feasibility evaluation results of IRIS-CoMan.
