Software-Defined Networking 2

3Scalability and Reliability Aware SDN Controller Placement Strategies

3.1. Introduction

In this chapter, we put forward novel strategies that address several aspects of the controller placement problem with respect to multiple reliability and performance criteria based on different uses and contexts (Bannour et al. 2017).

Our contribution to solving the controller placement problem is indeed intended for expanding IoT-like networks which face important scalability challenges in addition to reliability issues. The proposed SDN controller placement scheme uses heuristics with low computation time in order to deal with such large-scale and dynamic network environments where fast reevaluations of controller placement configurations are required to adapt in real-time to frequently changing network conditions. The potential of such heuristics in the context of SDN controller placement is explored by comparing two different types of heuristic-based algorithms according to various context-based strategies.

This chapter is organized as follows. In section 3.2 we provide an overview of state-of-the-art contributions that have addressed the controller placement problem. In section 3.3 we review the controller placement optimization problem and investigate the reliability and performance metrics involved. In section 3.4 we put forward our versatile approach to tackling this problem. In section 3.5 we present the obtained results. Finally, section 3.6 critically analyzes and discusses ...