TSSM: Time-Sharing Switch Migration to Balance Loads of Distributed SDN Controllers

Software-defined networking (SDN) makes network management easier by using a controller to govern all switches, but the controller may become a performance bottleneck. Distributed SDN control is a promising solution, which lets multiple controllers divide the work, where each controller manages a part of the network. Switch migration is one common means to the load balance of controllers, which transfers some switches to different subnets based on the workloads of their controllers. The paper proposes a time-sharing switch migration (TSSM) scheme to provide more refined load sharing for controllers, which allows two controllers to share a switch’s load sequentially in the same period. When a controller is overloaded, TSSM finds assistant controllers to share its workload by selecting proper switches for migration and also deciding the time to perform migration. In this way, the workload of each controller can be kept below a given threshold. We implement the TSSM scheme on the open network operating system (ONOS) to attest to its feasibility. Experimental results show that TSSM can reduce 98% of the occurrences of overload for controllers as compared with the original OpenFlow method. Moreover, TSSM can save about 78% of the migration cost than the churn-triggered migration method.