Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that decouples the control plane from the data plane. The data plane is composed of forwarding elements called switches and the control plane is composed of controllers. SDN is gaining popularity from industry and academics due to its advantages such as centralized, flexible, and programmable network management. The increasing number of traffics due to the proliferation of the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices may result in two problems: (1) increased processing load of the controller, and (2) insufficient space in the switches’ flow table to accommodate the flow entries. These problems may cause undesired network behavior and unstable network performance, especially in large-scale networks. Many solutions have been proposed to improve the management of the flow table, reducing controller processing load, and mitigating security threats and vulnerabilities on the controllers and switches. This paper provides comprehensive surveys of existing schemes to ensure SDN meets the quality of service (QoS) demands of various applications and cloud services. Finally, potential future research directions are identified and discussed such as management of flow table using machine learning.

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Software-defined network (SDN) is a new paradigm that decouples the control plane and data plane. This offered a more flexible way to efficiently manage the network. However, the increasing number of traffics due to the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices also increase the number of flow arrival which in turn causes flow rules to change more often, and similarly, path setup requests increased. These events required route path computation activities to take place immediately to cope with the new network changes. Searching for an optimal route might be costly in terms of the time required to calculate a new path and update the corresponding switches. However, the current path selection schemes considered only single routing metrics either link or switch operation. Incorporating link quality and switch’s role during path selection decisions have not been considered. This paper proposed Route Path Selection Optimization (RPSO) with multi-constraint. RPSO introduced joint parameters based on link and switches such as Link Latency (LL), Link Delivery Ratio (LDR), and Critical Switch Frequency Score (CWFscore). These metrics encourage path selection with better link quality and a minimal number of critical switches. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme reduced path stretch by 37%, path setup latency by 73% thereby improving throughput by 55.73%, and packet delivery ratio by 12.5% compared to the baseline work.