Evaluating heuristic techniques as a solution of controller placement problem in SDN

SDN has dramatically changed the landscape of the current network paradigm by regulating the network through software in the control plane, called a controller. However, owing to scalability issues in WAN, multiple controllers are deployed for better management of the network. In this paper, we first design the mathematical model for the Controller Placement Problem (CPP) and Reliable CPP (RCPP). While solving CPP and RCPP, we are trying to minimize the total average latency and take the capacity of the controller, and load on the switch as constraints. Afterward, we simulated our proposed approach Varna Based Optimization (VBO), and compared it with other traditional population-based heuristic algorithms such as PSO, TLBO, Jaya, BOA, and WOA. It has been observed and found that VBO provides better results in comparison to others in most of the cases. In order to establish the validity of simulation results, we have deployed the results obtained from simulation over a real and operational emulation-based setup created via ONOS controller and mininet. The emulation results exhibit the same behaviour as simulation.