Joint Routing and Bandwidth Allocation in Hybrid Software Defined Networks

Software defined networks (SDN) has gained a lot of attention from both academia and industry recently. SDN is a new networking paradigm that decouples the control plane from the data plane. In this paradigm, control functions are centralized in an SDN controller. The migration from traditional networks to SDN is highly challenging for network operators. Sudden migration may not be possible due to the cost and operational issues. Therefore, incremental deployment of SDN is considered as a viable solution, resulting in the formation of hybrid SDN networks. An important task in hybrid SDN networks is bandwidth allocation and routing considering the coexistence of both conventional and SDN-enabled routers. In this paper, we first formulate this problem as a multi-objective integer program with delay and capacity constraints. Then, a heuristic approach is proposed to combat the computational complexity of the model. Our proposed method is extensively analyzed through simulations, and the evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.