Joint SDN Synchronization and Controller Placement in Wireless Networks using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Software Defined Networking has afforded numerous benefits to the network users but there are certain persisting issues with this technology, two of which are scalability and privacy. The natural solution to overcoming these limitations is a distributed SDN controller architecture where multiple controllers are deployed over the network, with each controller orchestrating a certain segment of the network. However, since the centralized control is the key attribute of SDN that allows it to be so beneficial, a centralized logical view of the network will have to be maintained by each of these controllers; this can be done through synchronization of the distributed controllers, where each controller communicates with the others to ensure that they remain informed about the entire network. There is however a network cost associated with constantly having to update each others about different aspects of the network, which will become a greater issue in dynamic wireless networks. To minimize this network cost, there is a need to consider not only when to get the update information from the neighboring controllers, but also where to dynamically place the controllers such that the network costs may be minimized. The placement should take into consideration both communication for synchronization among the distributed controllers and communication of the controllers with the network devices that they manage. In this work, we show that our multi-objective deep reinforcement learning-based method performs the best at achieving different application goals by developing policy for controller synchronization as well as placement, outperforming different other possible approaches, under a wide variety of network conditions.