TLS Channel Implementation for ONOS's East/West-Bound Communication

East/West-bound communication is the communication channel which exists only in the distributed software-defined network (SDN) that governs the communication within the control plane of the network. Unlike most SDN projects, that have neglected the security of, and have achieved east/west-bound communication with the assistance of a network application on the management plane through the representational state transfer (REST) application program interface (API), the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) was designed with distributed functionality as one of its core features. Hence, it supports both the native intra-cluster and the network application's inter-cluster communication. In this paper, the transport layer security (TLS) channel for ONOS's native east/west-bound communication was implemented and the performance impact was evaluated.