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Improving Switch-to-Controller Assignment with Load Balancing in Multi-controller Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN)

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Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) gains a lot of interest from network operators due to its ability to offer flexibility, efficiency and fine-grained control over forwarding elements (FE) by decoupling control and data planes. In the control plane, a centralized node, denoted controller, receives requests from ingress switches and makes decisions on path forwarding. Unfortunately, requests processing may lead to controller performance degradation as the number of incoming requests goes up. This paper deals with the controller performance issue in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN). Mainly, it proposes a new approach to optimize the switch-to-controller assignment problem with load balancing support. The issue is formulated as a Minimum Cost Bipartite Assignment optimization problem which is solved using an improvement of the Hungarian algorithm. The new algorithm is based on the introduction of the load-driven penalty concept which aims to achieve a trade-off between the round trip time and the controller load. Finally, a new protocol denoted Distributed Hungarian-based Assignment Protocol (DHAP) is described as an implementation of the proposed solution in multi-controller environments. As shown in results, the proposed solution outperforms parallel schemes in terms of flow setup time and load balancing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PRINCE Lab, University of Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia

    Ali El Kamel

  2. CCK, Manouba, Tunisia

    Habib Youssef

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  1. Ali El Kamel
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  2. Habib Youssef
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Correspondence to Ali El Kamel.

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El Kamel, A., Youssef, H. Improving Switch-to-Controller Assignment with Load Balancing in Multi-controller Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN). J Netw Syst Manage 28, 553–575 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-020-09523-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-020-09523-2

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