CLIP: Centrality-Led ILP Controller Placement for Software-Defined Networking
Md Imtiaz Ahmed, Yaser Al Mtawa · Procedia Computer Science · 2025
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) revolutionizes network architectures by decoupling control and data planes, with controller placement critically impacting performance metrics. While existing state-of-the-art approaches focus on heuristic solutions or single-objective optimization for the Controller Placement Problem (CPP), this study advances the field through a rigorous mathematical formulation integrating both topological characteristics (distance matrices) and network centrality measures (betweenness centrality). We propose CLIP, an integer linear programming (ILP)-based solution that simultaneously optimizes for latency reduction, reliability enhancement, and number of controllers, addressing key limitations in current solutions. Experimental validation demonstrates that our SDN-enabled framework outperforms conventional legacy networks by 49.92-51.60% in latency reduction, while maintaining comparable deployment costs. These results establish a new benchmark for CPP optimization, particularly in scenarios requiring balanced multi-objective decision-making under real-world constraints. The findings provide network architects with a principled methodology for SDN deployment that surpasses current industry standards.