A K-means-based network partition algorithm for controller placement in software defined network

Software Defined Networking (SDN), the novel paradigm of decoupling the control logic from packet forwarding devices, has been drawing considerable attention from both academia and industry. As the latency between a controller and switches is a significant factor for SDN, selecting appropriate locations for controllers to shorten the latency becomes one grand challenge. In this paper, we investigate multi-controller placement problem from the perspective of latency minimization. Distinct from previous works, the network partition technique is introduced to simplify the problem. Specifically, the network partition problem and the controller placement problem are first formulated. An optimized K-means algorithm is then proposed to address the problem. Extensive simulations are conducted and results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can remarkably reduce the maximum latency between centroid and their nodes compared with the standard K-means. Specifically, the maximum latency can reach 2.437 times shorter than the average latency achieved by the standard K-means.