Joint Controller Placement and TDMA Link Scheduling in SDN-enabled Tactical MANETs
Yiannis Papageorgiou, Merkourios Karaliopoulos, Iordanis Koutsopoulos · MILCOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) · 2022
In this paper, we study the interplay of TDMA link scheduling and SDN Controller placement in SDN-enabled tactical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The network needs to serve both user data flows, each with a (source, destination) pair, and the SDN control-plane messages exchanged between the Controller(s) and the rest of the nodes over SDN control paths. The delay suffered by those messages has to be minimized to help the SDN layer respond to the dynamic topological and traffic demand changes of those networks. This delay is affected by two network control functions: the placement of the SDN Controller(s), which determines the control traffic paths from the switches to the controller(s), and the TDMA scheduling of control path links. In this paper, we experiment with various Controller placement update policies and SDN-aware TDMA scheduling mechanisms and assess their impact on the average and worst-case communication delays over SDN control paths. We find that adding SDN awareness into TDMA scheduling can relax the need for frequent updates of the SDN Controller placement, thus achieving comparable delays with an ideal policy that updates the placement every time something changes in the network topology or user data traffic.