A distributed decision mechanism for controller load balancing based on switch migration in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides flexible network management by decoupling control plane from data plane. And multiple controllers are deployed to improve the scalability and reliability of the control plane, which could divide the network into several subdomains with separate controllers. However, such deployment introduces a new problem of controller load imbalance due to the dynamic traffic and the static configuration between switches and controllers. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Distribution Decision Mechanism (DDM) based on switch migration in the multiple subdomains SDN network. Firstly, through collecting network information, it constructs distributed migration decision fields based on the controller load condition. Then we choose the migrating switches according to the selection probability, and the target controllers are determined by integrating three network costs, including data collection, switch migration and controller state synchronization. Finally, we set the migrating countdown to achieve the ordered switch migration. Through verifying several evaluation indexes, results show that the proposed mechanism can achieve controller load balancing with better performance.