Scalable and Crash-Tolerant Load Balancing Based on Switch Migration for Multiple OpenFlow Controllers

As the size of networks continues to increase, the scalability of the centralized controller becomes increasingly issues in Software Defined Networking. Distributed controllers have been proposed to solve the problem that the centralized controllers such as NOX and Floodlight suffer from. That logically centralized, but physically distributed architecture divide the network into zones with separate multiple controllers to achieve a better scalability control plane. However, Such distributed architecture introduces a new challenge to the load rebalancing of controllers when uneven load distribution among the controllers due to the statically configured mapping between a switch and a controller. Therefore, under variable traffic conditions in real networks, keeping load balance dynamically among the controller clusters is essential for realizing a high performance and scalability control plane. To address these issues, we propose a dynamic load rebalancing method based on switch migration mechanism for clustered controllers. The multiple controllers use JGroups to coordinate actions for switch migration. The whole network is divided into several groups and each group is set up one controller cluster. Our proposed method can dynamically shift the load across the multiple controllers through switch migration. The mechanism support controller failover without switch disconnection avoiding the single point of failure problem. We also implemented a prototype system based on OpenDaylight Hydrogen controller to evaluated the performance of our design. Our preliminary result shows that the method enables controllers to relieve the overload via switch migration and can improve throughput and reduce the response time of the control plane.