Semantic-Based Heterogeneous Controller Collaboration for Space-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

In heterogeneous SDN networks, controllers deploying different protocols need to cooperate with each other and establish a global network view that can be passed to the network applications for unified management and end-to-end decision-making. Unfortunately, there is no standard northbound interface protocol to integrate heterogeneous SDN controllers. To address this issue in this paper, we propose an approach to find the mapping among controller ontologies in the SDN network with heterogeneous controllers in this paper. We regard these controller ontologies as a solution for discovering similar elements between local ontologies and global ontology. By mapping controller ontologies in the heterogeneous network together, we can form the complete network view to achieve centralized management. The idea behind the approach is to use ontology to represent the conceptual data of various heterogeneous controllers and then map similar semantic data together to form a consistent, global network knowledge. Evaluation results show that our approach has better accuracy than other algorithms and has an acceptable execution time.