A Proposed Linear Multi-Controller Architecture to Improve the Performance of Software Defined Networks

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the rise of demand for moving from traditional networks towards software-defined networks, this has raised a lot of challenges. Software-defined networks are continually evolving, which include the need to address issues such as scalability, and packet loss, transmission delay and network congestion. accordingly, researchers introduced the concept of multi-controller architectures, although it will not assist to balance the load between them, it will tackle the network congestion issue through the distribution of load between them. the present study proposes a linear multi-controller architecture to explore the impact of increasing the number of controllers connected in a linear style on network performance. The study was based on the generation of simultaneous multi-flows with different sizes using Distributed Internet Traffic Generator(D-ITG). From the outcomes of our investigation, it is possible to conclude that the performance-enhanced uniformly with the number of controllers while preserving the same number of Open Vswitches. as the number of controllers reached four, The Quad-controller architecture recorded the best results related to improving the reduction of average delay and average jitter to 62% and 64% as well as increasing the throughput, bytes received, average packet rate to 32%, 32% and 31.8%.