Software-Defined Networking (SDN) premise sepa-rates the data plane from the control plane. The centralized control plane brings innovation, programmability, and flexibility for managing the underlying networks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control plane-based SDN scheme to achieve load balancing in SDN. The hierarchical architecture is composed of a load balancing control plane and a distributed control plane based SDN architecture. To achieve load balancing, we add an analytical network process (ANP)-based module to rank the controllers according to their load status, for which ANP is applied as an enabling module to forward the flows according to the load distribution of the controllers. The ANP module ranks the controllers according to their weights. Hence, it does not send the request to the overloaded controllers in the network. Our proposed scheme surpasses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and Default SDN based load balancing schemes. We have demonstrated the results in three Internet topologies i.e. Abilene, Chinanet, and OS3E regrading delay, and Jain's fairness index in Mininet emulator.
This work was supported partially by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2021-2018-0-01431) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning Evaluation), and by the BK21 FOUR program of the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF5199991514504)ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported partially by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2021-2018-0-01431) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning Evaluation), and by the BK21 FOUR program of the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF5199991514504).
