QoC-Aware Control Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks

In a distributed Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by a traffic flow through an SDN switch is primarily dependant on the SDN controller to which that switch is mapped. We propose a new controller-quality metric known as the Quality of Controller (QoC) which is defined based on the controller’s reliability and response time. We model the controller reliability based on Bayesian inference while its response time is modelled as a linear approximation of the M/M/1 queue. We develop a QoC-aware approach for solving (i) the switch-controller mapping problem and, (ii) control traffic distribution among the mapped controllers. Each switch is mapped to multiple controllers to enable resilience with the switch-controller mapping and control traffic distribution based on the QoC metric which is the combined cost of controller reliability and response time. We first develop an optimization programming formulation that maximizes the minimum QoC among the set of controllers to solve the above problem. Since the optimization problem is computationally prohibitive for large networks, we develop a heuristic algorithm — Qoc-Aware switch-coNTroller Mapping (QuANTuM) — that solves the problem of switch-controller mapping and control traffic distribution in two stages such that the minimum of the controller QoC is maximized. Through simulations, we show that the heuristic results are within 18% of the optimum while achieving a fair control traffic distribution with a QoC min-max ratio of up to 95%.