A Switch Migration-Based Decision-Making Scheme for Balancing Load in SDN

Elastic scaling and load balancing with efficient switch migration are critical to enable the elasticity of software-defined networking (SDN) controllers, but learning how to improve migration efficiency remains a difficult problem. To address this issue, a switch migration-based decision-making (SMDM) scheme is put forward that could be made aware of the load imbalance by a switch migration trigger metric; the migration efficiency model for this scheme is built to make a tradeoff between migration costs and the load balance rate. An efficiency-aware switch migration algorithm based on greedy method is designed to utilize the migration efficiency model and thus guide the choice of possible migration actions. We implement a proof of the scheme and present a numerical evaluation using Mininet emulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.