Latency and Reliability Aware SDN Controller: A Role Delegation Function as a Service

The emergency of machine type and ultra-reliable low latency communication is imposing stringent constraints for service provisioning. Addressing such constraints is challenging for network and cloud service providers. As a trending paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN) plays a significant role in future networks and services. However, the classical implementation of the SDN controller has limitations in-terms-of latency and reliability since the controller is decoupled from the forwarding device. Several research works have tried to tackle these challenges by proposing solutions such as Devoflow, DIFANE, and hierarchical and distributed controller deployment. Nonetheless, these approaches are not fully addressing these challenges. This paper tries to address the problem of latency and reliability by proposing a dynamic controller role delegation architecture for forwarding devices. To align with the microservice or multi-agent-based service-based architecture, the role delegation function as a service is proposed. The dynamic role delegation enables to predict and (pre-)installed flow rules in the forwarding devices based on various considerations such as network state, packet type, and service's stringent requirements. The proposed architecture is implemented and evaluated for latency and resiliency performance in comparison to the centralized and distributed deployment of the SDN controller. We used ComNetsEmu, a softwarized network emulation tool, to emulate SDN and NFV (Network Function Virtualization). The result indicated a significant decrease in latency and improved resilience in case of failure, yielding better network performance.