Mitigating the Oscillations Between Service Routing and SDN Traffic Engineering

A wide variety of existing applications will be deployed in software-defined networking (SDN). The centralized controller of SDN has a global network view and determines the forwarding path for each flow, which provides a feasible solution to deploy traffic engineering (SDN-TE). However, the conflict between each service and SDN-TE will occur inevitably due to the divergence of their objectives, and the interaction between these two selfish players will cause the network instability in fact. In order to solve this problem, we model the interaction as an alternative-offers bargaining game. In our strategies, each player sacrifices its performance to weaken the inevitable conflict and mitigate the oscillations. An exploratory study is adopt to investigate the interaction process based on the alternative-offers bargaining approach of the game theory, including the knowledge from the previous round and their strategies in each offer. This alternative-offers bargaining can make two players reach an agreement with a few rounds. Moreover, service routing and SDNTE can achieve the optimal outcome values at a stable state so that the network stability is improved. The simulation results show that the network stability is improved, and both SDN-TE and service routing converge to a satisfactory state.