Improving End-Users Utility in Software-Defined Wide Area Network Systems

Software Defined Networks (SDNs) has brought a new form of network architecture that simplifies network management through innovations and programmability. But, the distributed control plane of SD-Wide Area Network is challenged by load imbalance problem due to the dynamic change of the traffic pattern. The packet_in messages are one of the major contributors of the control's load. When such packet rate exceeds a certain threshold limit, the response time for control request increases non-linearly. In order to achieve better end-user experience, most of the previous works considered the optimal switch to controller association with an objective to minimize the response time on LAN environment but ignores the consequence of large scale network. In this regard, the proposed work realizes the necessity of layer-2 and layer-3 controller in LAN and WAN environment separately. A load prediction based alertness approach has been introduced to reduce the burden of the controllers. This approach may create an additional delay for the initial packets of the flow entry that lead to more prediction error. However, the proposed method reduces the error by selecting an optimal timeout value of the flow. Further, minimization of the response time between router to the controller has been taken care of. An extensive simulation shows the efficacy of the proposed scheme.