Software defined network partitioning with graph partitioning algorithms

Abstract

Software Defined Networks is an emerging paradigm in Internet communication world that increases the flexibility of today’s networks by decoupling control plane and data plane of the network devices. The fundamental aim is to centralize the control and reduce the complexity of the networks. The communication medium between control and data plane is through OpenFlow protocol, an open standard network protocol designed to manage the network traffic by software programs. To increase the scalability and flexibility of controllers the OpenFlow controllers are distributed based on location and network types. However, most critical issue is minimizing the communication cost between the controller domains. In this paper, two graph partitioning algorithms Fiduccia-Matthyses algorithm and Kernighan-Lin algorithm are used to minimize the communication cost between distributed OpenFlow controller domains. The implementation of the algorithms is under Matlab simulation environment. The methodology used for the proposed algorithms is to interchange the elements from one domain to other domain to calculate the gain. The simulated results show that Kernighan-Lin algorithm minimizes more communication cost rather than the Fiduccia-Matthyses algorithm.