To improve reliability and performance of Software Defined Networking (SDN) architectures, a number of recent efforts have proposed a logically centralized but physically distributed controller design that overcomes the bottleneck introduced by a single physical controller. Despite these advances, two key problems still persist. First, the task of controlling the host network and the task of controlling the control-plane network remain tightly intertwined, which incurs unwanted complexity in the controller design.
Second, the task of deploying the distributed controllers continues to be performed in a manual and static way. To address these two problems, this paper presents a novel approach called InitSDN to bootstrapping the distributed software defined network architecture and deploying the distributed controllers. InitSDN makes the SDN control plane design less complex, makes coordination among controllers flexible, provides additional reliability to the distributed control plane.