Dynamic Controller/Switch Mapping: A Service Oriented Assignment Approach

With the capability of decoupling the control plane and the data plane of networks, Software-Defined Network (SDN) enables flexible and efficient implementations in networks. In addition, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with Virtual Network Function (VNF) service chain capabilities provides high-performance networks with greater scalability, elasticity, and adaptability. Such an elastic deployment of service chains results in different Service Level Agreements (SLA) and resource requirements on the control plane. In this work, we illustrate the impact of service chains on the control plane and formulate the dynamic controller/switch mapping (DCSM) problem in NFV networks in order to reduce the operational cost. We address the combinatorial optimization problem, DCSM, by designing a novel mechanism to relax DCSM into a tractable problem based on the Penalty Successive Upper Bound Minimization (PSUM) method. In doing so, we conduct several simulation scenarios to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve a near-optimal result and reduce the operational cost up to 31.7% and 28.3% compared to K-Mean and the matching game-based approaches, respectively.