Maximizing SDN control resource utilization via switch migration

Software-Defined Networking is challenged by load imbalance of distributed control plane that is statically mapped to data plane. In this article, we design a scalable control mechanism via switch migration locally to maximize control resource utilization, and we define this problem as Switch Migration Problem (SMP). First, due to the various demands on controller CPU, bandwidth and memory for different switch, we provide a resource consuming model for SDN that takes the switches as the resource consumers and controllers as the resource providers. Then SMP is reduced to a network utilization maximization problem which is a typical combinational problem. Second, we introduce a synthesizing distributed algorithm to solve SMP - Distributed Hopping Algorithm (DHA), to disperse the calculations among the controllers involved. Finally, we implement a proof-of-concept for DHA based on Beacon controller, called DHA-CON, and the results are corroborated by several numerical simulations.