Joint Controller Placement and Control-Service Connection in Hybrid-Band Control

By separating the forwarding and control planes, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) facilitates flexible traffic routing and network management for a service network. Because of the impact of controller deployment on message transmission distances and network latency, controller placement problems have drawn many researchers' attention. However, assumptions in most existing research that all control packets are either transmitted in the service network (i.e., in-band control) or through predetermined control-service connection (i.e., out-of-band control) are not reasonable due to bandwidth resources occupation on the service network or high construction costs. In this paper, we are the first to jointly discuss the controller placement and control-service connection problem for latency minimization in the hybrid-band control mode, which is essentially a bi-level programming optimization problem. Specifically, we introduce auxiliary variables to simplify the above NP-hard problem. Next, Generalized Benders decomposition is used to obtain an optimal solution in theory. In addition, we propose a time-efficient fireworks algorithm with a little latency increment for large-scale networks. Extensive evaluations show that the two proposed algorithms accomplish the desired objectives and respectively achieve up to 35% and 25% latency decrement than greedy algorithms.

Automated summary

Researchers have discussed the issue of controller placement and control-service connection, and found that existing assumptions are not reasonable. This paper presents a study on these problems for the hybrid-band control mode, and proposes solutions accordingly.