CASM: A Cost-Aware Switch Migration Strategy for Elastic Optical Inter-Datacenter Networks

In inter-datacenter elastic optical networks, multi-controller deployment is adopted to improve the stability and scalability of the control plane. As the network scale increases, the traditional multi-controller deployment scheme ignores the dynamic characteristics of traffic, resulting in unbalanced load among multiple controllers. In response to this problem, the existing switch migration mechanism is proposed to achieve balanced distribution of control loads. However, most of the existing research work does not consider the additional cost of switch migration, and the load balancing performance of the controller is not significantly improved after switch migration. In this paper, we propose a cost-aware switch migration (CASM) strategy for controller load balancing. The proposed CASM strategy first measures the controller load through multiple performance indicators that affect the controller load, and then judges whether the controller is overloaded or underloaded based on the controller’s response time to the request message, thereby improving the load balancing performance of the controller. Additionally, when selecting the switch to be migrated, the CASM selects the optimal switch for migration based on minimizing the migration cost, thereby reducing the cost of switch migration. The performance evaluation shows that CASM significantly improves load balancing performance of controllers and reduces the migration cost compared to existing solutions.