Control plane delay minimization-based capacitated controller placement algorithm for SDN

Software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed as a new network paradigm which decouples control plane from data plane and provides flexible network management. In this paper, we consider the capacitated controller placement problem in SDN, which jointly determines the number, location, and the capacity matching strategy of SDN controllers. redTo stress the importance of control plane delay which is composed of both the transmission and processing delay between controllers and switches, and the inter-controller delay; we formulate control plane delay minimization problem subject to controller-switch association constraints, controller capacity constraints, etc. Since the formulated optimization problem is a complicated nonlinear integer programming problem which cannot be solved easily, we transform it into controller-switch association subproblem and controller capacity matching subproblem. To solve the controller-switch association subproblem, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on Dijkstra algorithm and K-means algorithm. Given the controller-switch association strategy, we then apply the Kuhn-Munkres (K-M) algorithm to solve the controller capacity matching subproblem and obtain the capacitated controller placement strategy. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.