Optimal and Secure Controller Placement in SDN Based Smart City Network

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud based systems has resulted in an increased demand of new services and applications. In an IoT network like smart city, it is desirable that these services and applications can be provisioned on demand and securely. SDN (Software Defined Networking) has emerged as a new paradigm that facilitates on demand provisioning of the network, services and applications. An efficient and secure controller placement is the key to the efficient deployment of an SDN based network. In this paper, we have addressed the dual problem of optimal and secure controller placement in an SDN based network such that it optimizes the flow setup time for dynamically changing network conditions. Our approach takes care of controller fault tolerance by introducing a well-defined strategy of Master-Equal-Slave (M-E-S) controllers combination. We have built our own Java based simulator and extensive simulations have been carried out to verify the proposed algorithms.