HSPC-SDN: Heuristic Driven Self-Configuring Proactive Controller for QoS-Centric Software Defined Network

Abstract

The exponential rise in software computing, low-cost hardware and allied application demands has broadened the horizon for wireless technologies to serve different purposes. Wireless communication systems being central to the modern innovation and industrial growth have given rise to the different communication ecosystems including internet of things, machine to machine communication, wireless local area network, Ad-hoc networks etc. However, coping with non-negotiable service level agreements have forced industries to ensure quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience demands. To meet such demands, software defined network (SDN) has gained widespread attention. The ability to enable higher programmability, flexibility and scalability makes SDN-based system viable; yet, guaranteeing their robustness towards dynamic network, link-failure and adaptive QoS-centric recovery has remained a challenge. In sync with this motive, in this paper a robust Heuristic Driven Self-Configuring Proactive Controller is designed for QoS-centric SDN network (HSPC-SDN). Unlike classical data-plane SDN controllers or allied routing solutions, HSPC-SDN performs multi-constraints risk assessment followed by heuristic driven disjoint multiple path selection to support proactive network failure-recovery. HSPC-SDN applies dynamic link-quality information, cumulative congestion degree, probability of successful transmission and link quality change index to perform best forwarding device selection to alleviate any malicious behaviour or malfunction during transmission. Subsequently, it applies genetic algorithm to perform disjoint multiple forwarding cum failure recovery path selection that in conjunction with AND logic function enables self-configuring route recovery to meet fault-tolerant QoS-centric communication. The proposed heuristic model exploits network availability information amalgamated with minimal distance and strictly no-shared component criteria to perform multiple disjoint forwarding-path cum recovery-path selection. Simulation based results revealed that HSPC-SDN, which can be implemented as a standalone single data-plane controller as well as a middleware routing concept achieves superior average packet delivery rate of 98.03%, packet loss rate of 1.97%, recovery time of 1.66ms and energy consumption of 77.14mJ over other disjoint forwarding path based SDN controllers.