HeS‐CoP: Heuristic switch‐controller placement scheme for distributed SDN controllers in data center networks

Abstract

Summary Software‐defined networking (SDN) has been widely researched and used to manage large‐scale networks such as data center networks (DCNs). An early stage of SDN controller experienced low responsiveness, low scalability, and low reliability. To solve these problems, distributed SDN controllers have been proposed. The concept of distributed SDN controllers distributes control messages among multiple SDN controllers. However, distributed SDN controllers must assign a master controller for each networking devices. Most previous studies, however, did not consider the characteristics of DCNs. Thus, they are not suitable to operate in DCNs. In this paper, we propose HeS‐CoP, a heuristic switch‐controller placement scheme for distributed SDN controllers in DCNs. With the control traffic load and CPU load, HeS‐CoP decides when our scheme should be performed in DCNs. To show the feasibility of HeS‐CoP, we designed and implemented an orchestrator that contains our proposed scheme and then evaluated our proposed scheme. As a result, our proposed scheme well distributes the control traffic load, decreases the average CPU load, and reduces the packet delay.

Controller placement problem in software‐defined networking: A survey

“…Gao et al [45] handle the problem of traffic load imbalance in devolved controllers by formulating it as a problem of balancing traffic load among m partitions. Kim et al [76] propose a forward and backward algorithm to change the master controller of a switch in DCN. The former approach is used to change the master controller of the switch generating the highest traffic.…”

A Survey of Controller Placement Problem in Software Defined Networks

“…al. [186] is also targeted towards DCN. Their primary aim is to distribute the control traffic load of a SDN network among multiple controllers so as to reduce packet delay in the data plane as well as reduce the flow setup time.…”