A New Set Covering Controller Placement Problem Model for Large Scale SDNs

Software Defined Network (SDN) is an emerging architecture that can overcome the challenges facing traditional networks. SDN enables administrator/operator to build a simpler and manageable network. New SDN paradigms are encouraged to deploy multiple (rather than centralized) controllers to monitor the entire system. The Controller Placement Problem (CPP) is one of the key issues in SDN that affects every aspect of it such as scalability, convergence time, fault tolerance and node to controller latency. This problem has been investigated in diverse papers with their major attention paid on optimizing the location of an arbitrary number of controllers. The related works in this area get less attention to two following important issues. i) Bidirectional end-to-end latency between switch and its controller instead of propagation latency, ii) finding the minimal number of controllers that even is a prerequisite for locating them. In this paper, a Set Covering Controller Placement Problem Model (SCCPPM) to find the least number of required controllers with regard to carrier grade latency requirement is proposed. The new model is carried out on a set of 124 graphs from the Internet Topology Zoo and solve them with IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization package. As expected, our results indicate that the number of required controllers for high resiliency is dependent on topology and network size. As well, in order to achieve carrier grade requirement, 86 percent of topologies must have more than one controller.