Controller placement in software defined networks using multi-objective antlion algorithm

Software defined network (SDN) is a new modern network technology which decouples control plane and data plane to simplify network management. The separation of control plane from data plane arises the control placement problem (CPP) in these networks. The main questions in the CPP are (1) how many controllers are required to be used in such networks and (2) where these controllers should be placed. To achieve an efficient solution for such problem in SDN, we define the CPP as a multi-objective combinational optimization problem in this paper and solve the CPP by applying the antlion optimization algorithm on it. We consider three metrics for the CPP: (a) Inter-controllers latency, (b) switch to controller latency, and (c) multiple disjoint connectivity paths between switches and controllers. We evaluate our proposed solution by performing several experiments using different real network topologies. Experimental results show that our proposed solution provides better performance compared to the existing solutions.