Load migration protocols have been used for load balancing in network controllers. In this poster, we argue that other network applications (e.g., power saving, network security, failure recovery, etc.) have properties that might require different load migration protocols. We introduce four new load migration protocols and show how they might match different application requirements better. We present preliminary experimental results for one of these protocols that show more than 20%-30% speedup in the total load migration time.

As network traffic and conditions change, the load on different instances of control plane changes. To ensure various control applications can operate continuously and efficiently, we need to migrate the load among controller instances. For this, we need a migration schedule that minimizes the overall migration time while ensuring the quality of service and controller resource constraints. In this poster, we show this problem is NP-hard, and show how a heuristic algorithm performs close to the best existing solution with orders of magnitude reduction in scheduling time.