A Scalable and Hierarchical Load Balancing Model for Control Plane of SDN
Qiaozhi Xu, Lin Li, Jiamei Liu, Junxing Zhang · 2018
Many studies adopt methods of migrating switches to balance the load among multi controllers in a distributed SDN architecture, but the flow forwarded to the switches may fail and the delay will increase when the migration is carried out, and it may result in a huge economic losses. We propose SHLB, a scalable and hierarchical load balancing model for the control-plane of SDN, which effectively alleviates the load unbalancing in the control-plane by inserting a middle-plane between the control-plane and data-plane. The middle-plane shields the data-plane from control-plane, and makes the adjustments of the control-plane transparent to data-plane. In addition, SHLB avoids switches' migrations among controllers and improves the network performance greatly. Finally, the results show that compared with the 2-layer distributed SDN architecture, SHLB relieves the overload of the control-plane and improves the latency, stability and scalability of the network significantly.