Premium
Scalable SDN architecture with distributed placement of controllers for WAN
Author(s) -
Zhao Zhipeng,
Wu Bin
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.4030
Subject(s) - computer science , software defined networking , scalability , distributed computing , forwarding plane , heuristic , computer network , load balancing (electrical power) , node (physics) , controller (irrigation) , integer programming , network packet , algorithm , engineering , agronomy , geometry , mathematics , structural engineering , database , artificial intelligence , biology , grid
Summary By separating control plane from data plane, software‐defined network (SDN) adopts centralized controllers to manage data flows in the network. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of network service traffic requires a large number of controllers, reducing network performance due to the scalability constraint. Therefore, we consider distributed placement of controllers in wide‐area network to construct a scalable SDN architecture, by taking service traffics, traffic propagation delay, and load balancing into account. Specifically, we first partition the network into several small sections (named SDN domains) and then place the least amount of controllers to a proper node in each domain. The architecture provides a control channel to deliver requested messages for each SDN domain, so it reduces the link delay (which is assumed to be proportional to the physical length of the link) between switches and SDN controllers. Unfortunately, it also introduces extra latency among controller sets at different SDN domain. Accordingly, we formulate an integer linear program to optimize network cost and performance by considering all those conflicting factors and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm called distributed SDN placement to solve the problem. Simulation results confirm that our proposed heuristic distributed SDN placement can achieve suboptimal solutions as compared with the integer linear program results.