Reliable and load balance-aware multi-controller deployment in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides flexible network management by decoupling control plane and data plane. However, such separation introduces the issues regarding the reliability of the control plane and controller load imbalance in the distributed SDN network, which will cause the low network stability and the poor controller performance. This paper proposes Reliable and Load balance-aware Multi-controller Deployment (RLMD) strategy to address the above problems. Firstly, we establish a multiple-controller network model and define the relevant parameters for RLMD. Then, we design the corresponding algorithms to implement this strategy. By weighing node efficiency and path quality, Controller Placement Selection (CPS) algorithm is introduced to explore the reliable deployments of the controllers. On this basis, we design Multiple Domain Partition (MDP) algorithm to allocate switches for controllers according to node attractability and controller load balancing rate, which could realize the reasonable domain planning. Finally, the simulations show that, compared with the typical strategies, RLMD has the better performance in improving the reliability of the control plane and balancing the distribution of the controller loads.