A Multi Objective Controller Placement Problem in SDN based wireless Networks using the Metaheuristic Algorithms

A new paradigm of logically centralized network control has been provided by software defined networking (SDN) architecture in recent years.The vital role of controllers in this architecture highlights a main challenge regarding the number and the locations of the controllers which are known as controller placement problem (CPP).In this paper, the CPP is proposed for a Wireless Loal Area Network (WLAN) including several APs having different traffic load.The proposed CPP system model includes several local controllers (LCs) and a global controller (GC) which should be located in optimum locations leading to the maximum value of three metrics simultaneously: Quality of Service (QoS), load balancing and delay.Therefore, two metaheuristic optimization algorithms are applied: Artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA) and Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA).The evaluation results are compared to the basic method (Genetic Algorithm) and the results indicate the superiority of the AHA method in finding the best solution of the controller locations.