Latency-Based Dynamic Controller Assignment in Hybrid SDNs: Considering the Impact of Legacy Routers

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a modern network architecture, which separates the network control plane from the data plane. Considering the gradual migration from traditional networks to SDNs, the hybrid SDN, which consists of SDN-enabled devices and legacy devices, is an intermediate state. For wide-area hybrid SDNs, to guarantee the control performance, such as low latency, multi SDN controllers are usually needed to be deployed at different places. How to assign them to switches and partition the network into several control domains is a critical problem. For this problem, the control latency and the packet loss rate of control messages are important metrics, which have been considered in a lot of previous works. However, hybrid SDNs have their unique characters, which can affect the assignment scheme and have been ignored by previous studies. For example, control messages pass through Legacy Forwarding Devices (LFDs) in hybrid SDNs and cause more latency and packet loss rate for queuing compared with SDN-enabled Forwarding Devices (SFDs). In this paper, we propose a dynamic controller assignment scheme in hybrid SDNs, which is called the Legacy Based Assignment (LBA). This scheme can dynamically delegate each controller with a subset of SFDs in the hybrid SDNs, whose objective is to minimize average SFD-to-control latency. We performed some experiments compared with other schemes, which show that our scheme has a better performance in terms of the latency and the packet loss rate.