Abstract
Incorporating the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm into mobile networking has its strengths and weaknesses. Aside from the promising benefits that SDN brings to the realm of networking, there are still some challenging issues. For instance, the drastic increase in using real-time demanding applications, combined with mobility, have led to a significant increase in the control traffic and can burden managing controllers. Therefore, we need dynamic adjustments and a redistribution of the load among the controllers to maintain acceptable levels of QoS to be delivered to mobile users. In this work, we propose a load balancing framework that employs vertical handovers to enable load balancing among a set of controllers managing heterogeneous wireless networks. Our main metric is the controller response time, since it affects the completion of any procedure associated with mobile users. Through simulation,our framework has shown as much decrease as a 36% decrease in response time.