Abstract:

Accelerated Software Defined Networking (SDN) adoption makes SDN paradigm emerging in the state of the art. Especially, the combination of SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) becomes a promising trend in deploying virtual network services for network operators. Although SDN can decouple networks into the control plane and the data plane to obtain flexible operation and programmability, there are many open issues that need to be addressed for SDN deployments, such as i) where to place SDN controllers in a given network, ii) how to assign connections from controllers to switches in terms of satisfying multiple objectives (e.g., resource utilization, failure, quality of services, etc.). In this work, we focus on the efficient assignment between SDN controllers and switches to guarantee a low operational cost, quality of services, and fault tolerance, in which the complexity of virtual links in network services, an omitted factor in current works, is considered and addressed. We formulate an optimization problem for dynamic controller/switch mapping (DCSM) in the network virtualization. We then proposed approximation algorithms in terms of relaxing the binary variables to solve the NP-hard problem, DCSM, in both centralized and distributed mechanisms. We also create various simulation schemes to evaluate our methods where they outperform state-of-the-art methods.