The Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks (ISTNs) with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) incorporated have become the emerging architecture and have attracted considerable attention recently. Therein, the joint gateway and controller placement problem is of fundamental significance for designing ISTNs with flexible and efficient management capabilities. Hence, how to achieve network reliability maximization with low network latency in the joint placement problem is worthy of in-depth study. In this paper, a network partition algorithm, Simulated Annealing Partition-based K-means (SAPKM), is proposed and analyzed for further ameliorating the problem. Experiments are performed on real network topologies to validate the effectiveness of our approach for the joint placement problem. Compared with the state-of-the-art existing works, numerical results show that SAPKM outperforms when deploying four or more controllers in terms of network reliability performance, network latency, and inter-plane latency with less than 2 ms to converge.
Keywords: Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks (ISTNs); Software-Defined Networking (SDN); joint gateway and controller placement; network reliability; propagation latency.