Abstract

Future 6G networks will be enabled by full softwarization of network functions & operations and in-network intelligence for self-management and orchestration. However, the intelligent management of a softwarized network will require massive data mining, analytics, and processing. That is why it is fundamental to find additional resources like quantum technologies to help achieve 6G key performance indicators. Quantum properties provide quantum computers to run a quantum algorithm with lesser queries. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) studies machine learning techniques on quantum computers. In this work, we use a QML algorithm to solve the controller placement problem for a multi-controller Software Defined Network (SDN). The network delay depends on where the controller is located, thus, it is critical to choose controllers at positions leading to minimize latency between the controllers and their associated switches. We consider an SDN architecture which is in its early stage of installation where the network nodes are deployed but connections will be established after obtaining controller locations, which results in the reduction of the overall controller to switch delay. By using different types of datasets, i.e., uniformly distributed and Gaussian distributed points, the experimental results show that the QML algorithm accelerates the SDN clustering methods (which are used to resolve the control placement problem) compared to those of the classical machine learning algorithm (like K-means) with comparable latency.