SDN Controller Assignment and Load Balancing with Minimum Quota of Processing Capacity

SDN technology has arrived to solve several limitations of standard networks such as flexibility, scalability and programmability. In a data center environment, adopting the SDN approach where switches are statically linked to controllers creates load balancing problems. This issue is due to the traffic variation between controllers and switches, which influences the response time of the controllers. In this paper, we propose a dynamic assignment of switches to controllers by formulating the problem as a one-to-many matching game with a minimum quota that each controller has to achieve. This quota represents the utilization of the processing capacity of the controller. In addition, an efficient algorithm is defined to ensure a stable matching between switches and controllers in order to maintain load balancing and reduce the latency of controllers. Numerical results confirm the performance of our proposed model compared to a static assignment of switches in terms of load balancing and minimization of the response time especially, when the network becomes too loaded.