D2Q Synchronizer: Distributed SDN Synchronization for Time Sensitive Applications

Abstract: In distributed Software-Defined Networking (SDN), distributed SDN controllers require synchronization to maintain a global network state. Despite the availability of synchronization policies for distributed SDN architectures, most policies do not consider joint optimization of network and user performance. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm called D2Q Synchronizer, to minimize long-term network costs by strategically offloading time-sensitive tasks to cost-effective edge servers while satisfying the latency requirements for all tasks. Evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of our synchronizer compared to heuristic and other learning policies in literature, by reducing network costs by at least 45% and 10%, respectively, while ensuring the QoS requirements for all user tasks across dynamic and multi-domain SDN networks.