Enhanced Multi-Controller Placements in SDN

Abstract

The proliferation of connected devices and data traffic leads to the design of “Software Defined Network” (SDN) that separates control logic from data forwarding logic for effective administration of the network through offering programmable interfaces. The control logic for a network is installed in SDN Controller, which may be placed in a few selected places of the network to effectively control network activities. There exist many research proposals to place the controllers in optimal locations of the network to improve the performances. However, a few attempts were made to identify the number of controllers required for a network and place them in optimal locations using meta-heuristic algorithms or mathematical models. Moreover, handling the fault tolerance in the event of controller problems due to heavy traffic has not been effectively addressed. Considering the aforementioned issues, this work proposes a Pareto based tabu search for optimal placement of controllers and a migration algorithm to handle controller overhead due to heavy traffic.