Multi-Objective Controller Failure Aware Capacitated Controller Placement in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking disassociates the control plane from data plane. The problem of deciding upon the number and locations of controllers and assigning switches to them has attracted the attention of researchers. Foreseeing the possibility of failure of a controller, a backup controller has to be maintained for each switch so that the switches assigned to the failed controller can immediately be connected to their backup controllers. Hence, the switches cannot experience disconnections in case of failure of their controller. In this paper, two mathematical models are proposed. The first model focuses on minimizing the average of latencies from all switches to their backup controllers while considering the failure of the controllers. The second model aims at minimizing both the average and worst-case of latencies from all switches to the corresponding backup controllers. Both of our models are evaluated on three networks and are compared (in terms of two metrics, viz., average and worst-case latencies) with an existing model that focuses on minimizing only worst-case latency. The first model gives better average latency compared to the reference model. The second model also gives better average latency and almost equal worst-case latency compared to the reference model.