Dynamic Switch Allocation to Reduce Costs In Software Defined Networks

Software defined network is a new computer network architecture who separates controller and data layer in network devices such as switches and routers. Separation of the control plane and the data plane has many benefits, such as more programmability of the control plane, the possibility of network virtualization, reduction of operating costs, greater independence of network equipment manufacturers, and so on. By the emerge of software defined networks, a class of location problems, called controller placement problem, has attracted much more research attention. The task in the problem is to simultaneously find optimal number and location of controllers satisfying a set of routing and capacity constraints. In this paper, we suggest an effective solution method based on dynamic switches allocation. We, then compare our method to an existing standard mathematical programming solver on an extensive set of problem instances. It turns out that our suggested method is computationally much more effective and efficient over small to large instances.