Abstract
Summary As software‐defined networking (SDN) is a logically centralized technology, the control plane scalability in SDN is increasingly important with the network scale increasing. Load balancing and maximizing resource utilization are very critical to the control plane in SDN, while switch migration is an effective approach to achieve these two performance metrics. However, switch migration is NP‐hard problem because it belongs to the problem of combinatorial optimization. To avoid the NP‐hard problem, we propose a switch migration scheme by adopting noncooperative game to improve the control plane scalability in SDN. First, we design a novel load balancing monitoring scheme to detect the load imbalance between controllers and trigger migrating switches. Then, we use noncooperative game among controllers to decide switch migration to get the maximizing overall profits. Last, we prove that our proposed approach can get Pareto optimality. Extensive simulations prove that our method is able to achieve a more scalable control plane with load balancing and maximizing resource utilization.