ESCALB: An effective slave controller allocation-based load balancing scheme for multi-domain SDN-enabled-IoT networks

In software-defined networking (SDN), several controllers improve the reliability as well as the scalability of networks such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), with the distributed control plan. To achieve optimal results in IoT networks, an SDN can be employed to reduce the complexity associated with IoT and pro-vide an improved quality-of-service (QoS). With time, it is likely expected that the demand for IoT will rise, and a large number of sensors will be connected, which can generate huge network traffic. With these possibilities, the SDN controllers processing capacity will be surpassed by the traffic sent by the IoT sensors. To handle this kind of challenge, and achieve promising results, a dynamic slave controller allocation with a premeditated mechanism can play a pivotal role to accomplish the task management and migration plan. Following this, we proposed an efficient slave controller allocation-based load bal-ancing approach for a multi-domain SDN-enabled IoT network, which aims to transfer switches to a con-troller with idle resources effectively. Among several slave controllers for selecting a target controller, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) strategy, i.e., an analytical network process (ANP) has been used in our approach to enrich communication metrics and maintain high-standard QoS statistics. Moreover, switch migration is modeled with knapsack 0/1 problem to achieve maximum utilization of the slave controllers. Our proposed scheme enabled with a flexible decision-making process for selecting con-trollers with varying resources. The results demonstrated with emulation environment show the effec-tiveness of the ESCALB.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).