Towards an optimal controllers' response time in a software‐defined network‐enabled data center

Abstract

SummaryIn a digital world changing at high speed, data centers still play a major role in new network architectures. Software‐defined network (SDN) technology is considered as a suitable solution to solve and overcome several limitations of standard data centers including flexibility, scalability, and ease of management. However, in an SDN with a distributed control plane, the assignment of switches could be a cause of generating significant latency that could degrade the Quality of Experience (QoE) of certain services and applications hosted on the data center. In this paper, we propose a matching game algorithm ensuring a dynamic assignment of switches. Its main characteristic is to achieve a fair assignment while balancing the load generated by the data plane among all controllers resulting in a balanced response time. The numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms other existing state‐of‐the‐art algorithms in terms of minimizing controllers' response time.