Fault tolerant and load balancing model for software defined networking controllers

Abstract

Previous years have seen increased interest in a new network paradigm, Software defined networking (SDN). The basic idea behind this new concept consists of removing the smart parts of the connectivity components and moving them to a seul control point known as a controller. This centralized network view makes the network maintenance and management easier and facilitates the creation of new services. Despite many advantages of SDN, the concentration of network intelligence in a single controller raises serious challenges that impact SDN scalability, performance, and fault tolerance. One of the main problems in SDN is controller failure. In this article, we develop a fault tolerant model called fault-tolerant load balancing (FTLBC) for SDN controllers. To reduce the cascading failure problem, the proposed model requires the load of the failing controller to be shared among other controllers. In the case of a controller failure, The FTLBC model concentrates on distributing the load among the remaining controllers based on the load of the orphans' switches and the load of the remaining controllers.