Optimal Placement for Heterogeneous Controllers in SDN Based on Unbalanced Graph Partitioning

Software Defined Network (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, yielding a vast flexibility for networks. This paper focuses on the optimal placement for heterogeneous controllers. First, SDN networks are modeled using graph theory. Therefore, the controller placement problem is transformed into a specified graph partitioning problem. Then, an optimal controller placement scheme is proposed based on multi-level graph partitioning. Finally, Simulation experiments are conducted on real network topologies. The results indicate that our scheme can achieve nearly optimal controller load balance and is of application value to wide-area SDN deployments.