Swift migrations to balance essential load of distributed control plane in software defined networks

Abstract

Software defined network (SDN) has brought a new dimension to networking technology in recent years by decoupling the data plane and the control plane of networking devices. This decoupling enables the control plane device, called as SDN controller, to get the abstract view of the whole network and perform networking operations to the data plane devices (known as SDN switches) as necessary. The controller is responsible for managing and setting rules for the switches, and the job of the switches is to forward traffic according to the rules. In large-scale networking scenarios, where multiple SDN controllers are used to formulate a distributed controller architecture, a set of switches of the topology is connected to and managed by its corresponding controller. Any controller of distributed SDN architecture can get overloaded due to the heavy traffic of its corresponding switches. This controller overload can increase the response time and thereby degrade the end-user quality of service. To tackle the controller overload issue, in this work, an efficient load balancing framework is proposed, developed, and experimented with on top of the SDN controller. The resultant load-balancing algorithm has successfully shown its strength and weakness over some contemporary and notable works in this domain. Furthermore, a completely new module called the ”Restoration module” is introduced in our proposed framework to optimize the network further.