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LBABC: Distributed controller load balancing using artificial bee colony optimization in an SDN

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Abstract

Software Defined Networking(SDN) is a popular paradigm in modern networking. Specifically distributed SDN is an emerging area because of the problems present with scalability and reliability issues of single controller. However, There are challenges in distributed SDN in terms of placement of controllers, consistency and load balancing among controllers. This paper presents a mechanism for control plane load balancing in SDN. Although present solutions for load balancing in control plane exist, they concentrated on how to decrease the load on overload controller but unable to balance the load in long run to maintain even distribution of load, so there should be a requirement of even distribution of load in the control plane. To address this challenge, we presents a meta heuristic approach to load balancing mechanism for control plane that uses Artificial Bee Colony(ABC) optimization by shifting the load from heavy load controller to appropriate low load controller by working with different candidate solutions. We experimented our model LBABC, Load Balancing using ABC in control plane, using RYU controller and mininet emulator. Our model obtained an efficient results and avoiding unnecessary migrations compared to the existing models because of its optimal selection of switch and controller for switch migration.

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Data availability

The data generated during the current study is based on the traffic created by iperf command in mininet and we used a BT Asia-Pacific topology from Internet Topology Zoo: http://www.topology-zoo.org/dataset.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computers and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046, Telangana, India

    K. Sridevi & Md Abdul Saifulla

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  1. K. Sridevi
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  2. Md Abdul Saifulla
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First author is the Research Scholar and second author is the Supervisor.

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Correspondence to K. Sridevi.

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Sridevi, K., Saifulla, M.A. LBABC: Distributed controller load balancing using artificial bee colony optimization in an SDN. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 16, 947–957 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01448-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01448-2

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