Incremental Deployment and Throughput Maximization Routing for a Hybrid SDN

To explore the advantages of software defined network (SDN), while preserving the legacy networking systems, a natural deployment strategy is to deploy a hybrid SDN incrementally to improve the network performance. In this paper, we address two technical challenges: an incremental deployment strategy and a throughput-maximization routing, for deploying a hybrid network incrementally. For incremental deployment, we propose a heuristic algorithm for deploying a hybrid SDN under the budget constraint, and prove the approximate factor of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ 1- \frac {1}{e} $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. For throughput-maximization routing, we apply a depth-first-search method and a randomized rounding mechanism to solve the multi-commodity <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$h$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-splittable flow routing problem in a hybrid SDN, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$h\ge 1$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We also prove that our method has approximation ratio <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O\left({\frac {1}{\log N}}\right)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ N $ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of links in a hybrid SDN. We then show, by both analysis and simulations, that our algorithms can obtain significant performance gains and perform better than the theoretical worst-case bound. For example, our incremental deployment scheme helps to enhance the throughout about 40% compared with the previous deployment scheme by deploying a small number of SDN devices, and the proposed routing algorithm can improve the throughput about 31% compared with ECMP in hybrid networks.