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Dynamic switch migration towards a scalable SDN control plane
Author(s) -
Cheng Guozhen,
Chen Hongchang,
Hu Hongchao,
Lan Julong
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.3101
Subject(s) - computer science , scalability , software defined networking , forwarding plane , distributed computing , game theory , computer network , openflow , bandwidth (computing) , resource allocation , resource (disambiguation) , operating system , network packet , economics , microeconomics
Summary Distributed control plane is a promising approach to scalable software‐defined networking (SDN). Live migration of switches from controllers that are overloaded to those that are underutilized may be a solution to handle peak switch traffic using available control resource. However, such migration has to be performed with a well‐designed mechanism to fully utilize available resources in all three resource dimensions: CPU, bandwidth, and memory. In this article, we first provide a resource model for SDN and reduce the switch migration decision to a centralized resource utilization maximization problem under constraints of CPU, bandwidth, and memory. Second, we show that the problem of maximizing resource utilization in an SDN is equivalent to that of maximizing game players' profits in the context of non‐cooperative game theory. Taking controllers and switches as game players and commodities respectively, the player policy is how to migrate switches among the control plane. Finally, we implement a proof of concept, called GAME‐Switch Migration (GAME‐SM). The numerical experiments using Mininet emulator validate nice properties of our game model in enhancing the performance of control plane in SDN. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.