A New Clustering Approach for Efficient Placement of Controllers in SDN using Firefly Algorithm

In Software Defined Network (SDN), controller plane is separated from the data plane simplifying management. In these networks, data forwarding cannot be conducted just one controller. Therefore, it is needed to use multiple controllers in control plane. Since, switch-controller propagation delays and inter-controller latencies affect the performance, the problem of determining appropriate number of controllers as well as their suitable locations are two main challenges, which are known as NP-Hard. In this paper, a new clustering method based on K-means, K-Harmonics means and firefly algorithm named CPP-KKF is proposed for controller placement in SDN. Result obtained by CPP- KKF algorithm is benefitted by the advantages of all techniques. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on four topologies of TopologyZoo with different scales, that include Aarnet, Colt, Cognet, and DFN and the conducted simulations demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms K-means, K-means++, Firefly and GSO algorithms in terms of aforementioned performance issues.