An efficient elastic distributed SDN controller for follow-me cloud

Follow Me Cloud (FMC) concept has emerged as a promising technology that allows seamless migration of services according to the corresponding users' mobility. Meanwhile, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new paradigm that permits to decouple the control and data planes of traditional network, and provides programmability and flexibility, allowing the network to dynamically adapt to changing traffic patterns and user demands. While the SDN implementations are gaining momentum, the control plane, however, is still suffering from scalability and performance concerns for a very large network. In this paper, we address these scalability and performance issues by introducing a novel SDN/OpenFlow-based architecture and control plane framework tailored for mobile cloud computing systems and more specifically for FMC-based systems where mobile nodes and network services are subject to constraints of movements and migrations. Contrary to centralized approach with single SDN controller, our approach permits to distribute the SDN/OpenFlow control plane on a two-level hierarchical architecture: a first level with a global controller G-FMCC, and second level with several local controllers L-FMCC(s). Thanks to our control plane framework and Network Function Virtual-ization concept (NFV), the L-FMCC(s) are deployed on-demand, where and when needed, depending on the global system load. Results obtained via analysis show that our solution ensures more efficient management of control plane, performances maintaining and network resources preservation.