A Self-Routing Technique for Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a centralized organization of computer networking in which all network switches are controlled and monitored by a single remote controller. Similar to any other centralized designs, having a single unit to control the entire network with a large number of nodes will introduce new vulnerabilities and challenges that require the controller to be involved in most network operations, an issue that entails greater consideration. In this study, we propose a self-routing technique for software-defined networks to reduce the number of interactions of the SDN controller in network operations. Our model follows a different technique to address the controller’s limitations by utilizing the transmitted traffic flows to reduce controller interactions without requiring any additional resources. To evaluate the impact of the proposed model, we implement a testbed network in order to measure and analyze the behavior of the proposed self-routing technique. The experiment results suggest a significant decrease of approximately 85% in the number of interactions between the controller and the network devices.