A novel framework for capacitated SDN controller placement: Balancing latency and reliability with PSO algorithm

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture theoretical framework, which based on the partition of the control plane and the data plane. Some of the important features of SDN are centralized network management, open code, scalability, effective utilization of network resources, effective traffic management, security etc. All these administrative decisions taken by the controller which lies at the top of the data plane. Efficient placing of controllers is essential to enhance the network’s reliability, which ultimately improves the performance of the network. Much of the work done in the SDN has been aimed on controller placement problems (CPP) by considering latency and reliability of the network separately whereas few of them acknowledged both latency and reliability simultaneously. We considered both communication latency and reliable communication to solve CPP. To achieve this, we aim to minimize the total average latency of the network with a reliable network model that can work perfectly up to the failure of n-1 controllers out of n deployed. We first formulate an efficient algorithm “Capacitated Controllers Arrangement (CCA)” to define the problem and used nature-based metaheuristic technique, Particle Swarm optimization (PSO) to achieve the solution. By intelligently allocating controllers, this dynamic system minimizes network latency and optimizes switch assignments. Three controllers deliver excellent reliability and latency performance even despite controller breakdowns, according to experiments conducted on the Internet2 OS3E architecture. This novel method not only increases SDN efficiency but also establishes a standard for further improvements in controller placement tactics. The outcome shows that the proposed approach achieves its goal efficiently and in future other multi-objective optimization techniques will be explored to solve reliability aware CPP.