Request Dispatching Over Distributed SDN Control Plane: A Multiagent Approach

Software-defined networking (SDN) allows flexible and centralized control in cloud data centers. An elastic set of distributed SDN controllers is often required to provide sufficient yet cost-effective processing capacity. However, this introduces a new challenge: Request Dispatching among the controllers by SDN switches. It is essential to design a dispatching policy for each switch to guide the request distribution. Existing policies are designed under certain assumptions, including a single centralized agent, global network knowledge, and a fixed number of controllers, which often cannot be satisfied in practice. This article proposes MADRina, Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning for request dispatching, to design policies with high dispatching adaptability and performance. First, we design a multiagent system to address the limitation of using a centralized agent with global network knowledge. Second, we propose a Deep Neural Network-based adaptive policy to enable request dispatching over an elastic set of controllers. Third, we develop a new algorithm to train the adaptive policies in a multiagent context. We prototype MADRina and build a simulation tool to evaluate its performance using real-world network data and topology. The results show that MADRina can significantly reduce response time by up to 30% compared to existing approaches.