Resource Allocation for Reliable Communication Between Controllers and Switches in SDN

In software-defined networking (SDN), the communication between controllers and switches is very important, for switch can only work by relying on flow tables received from its controller. Therefore, how to ensure the reliability of the communication between controllers and switches is a key problem in SDN. In this paper, we study this problem from two aspects: the controller placement and the resource backup aspect. Firstly, in order to implement the reliable communication and meet the required propagation delay between controllers and switches, a min-cover based controller placement approach is proposed. Then, in order to protect both controllers and control paths from regional failure, a backup method based on an exponential decay failure model is proposed, which considers the regional influence and the survivability of backup controllers and control paths. Simulations show that our controller placement approach can meet the reliability and delay requirement with appropriate controller allocation scheme, and our backup method can improve the survivability of backup controllers and control paths while ensuring the performance of control network.