Dynamic switch migration towards a scalable SDN control plane

Distributed control plane is a promising approach to scalable software-defined networking (SDN). Live migration of switches from controllers that are overloaded to those that are underutilized may be a solution to handle peak switch traffic using available control resource. However, such migration has to be performed with a well-designed mechanism to fully utilize available resources in all three resource dimensions: CPU, bandwidth, and memory. In this article, we first provide a resource model for SDN and reduce the switch migration decision to a centralized resource utilization maximization problem under constraints of CPU, bandwidth, and memory. Second, we show that the problem of maximizing resource utilization in an SDN is equivalent to that of maximizing game players' profits in the context of non-cooperative game theory. Taking controllers and switches as game players and commodities respectively, the player policy is how to migrate switches among the control plane. Finally, we implement a proof of concept, called GAME-Switch Migration (GAME-SM). The numerical experiments using Mininet emulator validate nice properties of our game model in enhancing the performance of control plane in SDN. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.