A Load Balancing Approach for Distributed SDN Architecture Based on Sharing Data Store

Software-defined networking (SDN) uses a centralized control plane to manage the whole network. Distributed SDN architecture has been proposed to resolve scalability and reliability problem. One challenge of multiple controllers is load balancing problem, that uneven load distribution among controllers. Dynamic switches migration is an effective way to solve this problem. However, the existing schemes focus on effective migration algorithms and different metrics to realize the load balancing of control plane in SDN, and do not consider the communication cost between controllers and computation cost of migration scheme. In order to address this issue, we propose a load balancing approach based on sharing data store. Sharing data store has the information of all controllers, and the calculator module in it can compute switches migration scheme based saved information. It can also reduce the computation and communication pressure of controllers. Simulation experiments exhibit the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.