Cuckoo-PC : An evolutionary synchronization-aware placement of SDN controllers for optimizing the network performance in WSNs

Due to reliability and performance considerations, employing multiple software-defined networking (SDN) controllers is known as a promising technique in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Nevertheless, employing multiple controllers increases the inter-controller synchronization overhead. Therefore, optimal placement of SDN controllers to optimize the performance of a WSN, subject to the maximum number of controllers, determined based on the synchronization overhead, is a challenging research problem. In this paper, we first formulate this research problem as an optimization problem, then to address the optimization problem, we propose the Cuckoo Placement of Controllers (Cuckoo-PC) algorithm. Cuckoo-PC works based on the Cuckoo optimization algorithm which is a meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by nature. This algorithm seeks to find the global optimum by imitating brood parasitism of some cuckoo species. To evaluate the performance of Cuckoo-PC, we compare it against a couple of state-of-the-art methods, namely Simulated Annealing (SA) and Quantum Annealing (QA). The experiments demonstrate that Cuckoo-PC outperforms both SA and QA in terms of the network performance by lowering the average distance between sensors and controllers up to 13% and 9%, respectively. Comparing our method against Integer Linear Programming (ILP) reveals that Cuckoo-PC achieves approximately similar results (less than 1% deviation) in a noticeably shorter time. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.