On load balancing via switch migration in software-defined networking

Switch-controller assignment is an essential task in multi-controller software-defined networking. Static assignments are not practical because network dynamics are complex and difficult to predetermine. Since network load varies both in space and time, the mapping of switches to controllers should be adaptive to sudden changes in the network. To that end, switch migration plays an important role in maintaining dynamic switch-controller mapping. Migrating switches from overloaded to underloaded controllers brings flexibility and adaptability to the network but, at the same time, deciding which switches should be migrated to which controllers, while maintaining a balanced load in the network, is a challenging task. This work presents a heuristic approach with solution shaking to solve the switch migration problem. Shift and swap moves are incorporated within a search scheme. Every move is evaluated by how much benefititwillgivetoboththeimmigrationandoutmigrationcontrollers.Theexperimentalresultsshowthat theproposedapproachisabletooutweighthestate-of-artapproaches,andimprovetheloadbalancingresults up to≈ 14% in some scenarios when compared to the most recent approach. In addition, the results show that the proposed work is more robust to controller failure than the state-of-art methods.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) - UID/MULTI/00631/2019;info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio