A Moth Flame Optimization for Failure Aware Controller Placement in Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an upcoming network model that emphasizes the separation of the control plane and the data plane, resulting in more flexibility, programmability, and network management. The problem of placement of controllers deals with the count of controllers that are needed and their location in the network to maintain the network structure. In a large network where multiple controllers are needed, the quantity and position of the controllers have a major impact on SDN’s performance and reliability. The network performance degrades significantly in case of controller failure. To avoid this situation, planning is required. A moth flame optimization algorithm is proposed for controller placement with planning, CPWP_MFO and compared with a genetic algorithm CPWP_GA. The aim is to place m controllers in the network to reduce the worst-case and average propagation latency considering controller failure and capacity constraint. The simulation results show that CPWP_MFO yields better results than CPWP_GA.