The exponential growth of intelligent systems technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Smart Connected Products, has intensified the difficulties of data governance. Organizations adopting these technologies face challenges in managing the volume, variety, and velocity of data while ensuring quality, security, compliance, and ethical integrity. This study investigates the state of big data governance (BDG) programs in organizations leveraging intelligent systems technologies, using a systematic literature review guided by PRISMA. A synthesis of insights from 74 peer-reviewed articles, conferences, and industry reports reveals both the significant benefits of BDG such as enhanced decision-making, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance and persistent challenges, including fragmented governance frameworks, limited scalability, data quality issues, and ethical concerns. To address these gaps, this study proposes the big data governance maturity assessment model (BDG MAM), a novel framework developed to assess and enhance the maturity of BDG programs. The BDG MAM evaluates governance maturity across four key dimensions: people, process, data, and technology. It provides a structured roadmap for organizations to benchmark governance practices, prioritize improvements, and implement effective strategies. The model was validated through a pilot study conducted with a public higher learning institution, demonstrating its practical applicability and effectiveness in real-world scenarios. By bridging theoretical insights with practical implementation, this study advances academic discourse and provides practitioners with a robust approach to navigate the challenges of modern data governance practices, ensuring sustainable and effective management of heterogeneous data environment.

Software-defined networking (SDN) brings an innovative approach to networking by adopting a flow-centric model and removing networking decisions from the data plane to provide them centrally from the control plane. A single centralized controller is used in a traditional SDN design. However, the complexity of modern networks, due to their size and requirements’ coarseness, has made using a single controller a source of performance bottlenecks. Similarly, the solution found by using multiple controllers in distributed control planes brings forth the profound issue of interoperability, consistency, and the “controller placement problem” (CPP). It is an NP-hard problem that deals with positioning controllers at optimum locations within the network and mapping with resources at the data plane to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements. Over the years, the problem has received significant attention from the research community, and many solutions have been considered. This paper offers an in-depth review of the proposals by providing an updated evolution of the problem concerning the application environment, design objectives, and cost and controller type. Based on our findings, new research ideas were identified and discussed.

Software-defined networking (SDN) enables flexible fine-grained networking policies by allowing the SDN controller to install packet handling rules on distributed switches. The behaviour of SDN depends on the set of forwarding entries installed at the switch flow table. The increasing number of traffics from the proliferation of the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices increase the processing load on the controller and generates an additional number of entries stored in the flow table. However, the switch flow table memory (TCAM) cannot accommodate many entries. Packets from multimedia flows are usually large in size and thus suffer processing delay and require more flow set up requests. The SDN controller may be overloaded and face some scalability problems because it supports a limited number of requests from switches. OpenFlow uses timeout configuration to manage flow setup request. The conventional fixed timeout cannot cope up with the dynamic nature of traffic flows. This paper controls the frequent flow setup requests by proposing an adaptive and hybrid idle–hard timeout allocation (AH-IHTA). The algorithm considers traffic patterns, flow table usage ratio, and returns appropriate the timeout to different flows. The performance evaluations conducted have shown a 28% and 39% reduction in the flow setup request and flow eviction, respectively.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a trending architecture that separates controller and forwarding planes. This improves network agility and efficiency. The proliferation of the Internet of Things devices has increased traffic flow volume and its heterogeneity in contemporary networks. Since SDN is a flow-driven network, it requires the corresponding rule for each flow in the flowtable. However, the traffic heterogeneity complicates the rules update operation due to varied quality of service requirements and en-route behavior. Some flows are delay-sensitive while others are long-lived with a propensity to consume network buffers, thereby inflicting congestion and delays on the network. The delay-sensitive flows must be routed through a path with minimal delay, while congestion-susceptible flows are guided along a route with adequate capacity. Although several efforts were introduced over the years to efficiently route flows based on different QoS parameters, the current path selection techniques consider either link or switch operation during decisions. Incorporating composite path metrics with flow classification during path selection decisions has not been adequately considered. This paper proposes a technique based on composite metrics with flow classification to differentiate congestion-prone flows and reroute them along appropriate paths to avoid congestion and loss. The technique is integrated into the SDN controller to guide the selection of paths suitable to each traffic class. Compared to other works, the proposed approach improved the path load ratio by 25%, throughput by 35.6%, and packet delivery ratio by 31.7%.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) emerged to simplify network management and speed up innovation through a clear separation of the control plane from the data plane using OpenFlow standard. Link or switch failure occurs more often. The detect switch has to send a port status message to the controller to update the Flow Table with a new path or switch to a preconfigured backup path to recover from the failure. Most of the existing schemes are focusing on distance or delay in backup path selection. However, traffic flows exhibit variabilities and losses caused by flows also differ with respect to Flow Table utilization. Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) that stores flow entries in the Flow Table is costly with limited space. It is significant to reduce backup path entries resource consumption through different failure recovery strategies while considering the Flow Table utilization ratio at sampling time, flow classification, and shortest path. This paper devised an algorithm for backup path computation based on the shortest path, flow classification, and Flow Table utilization ratio. The simulation result shows higher throughput of (71.2), lower packet losses (3 %), and round-trip time (3.4 s).

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking architecture with improved efficiency achieved by moving networking decisions from the data plane to provide them critically at the control plane. In a traditional SDN, typically, a single controller is used. However, the complexity of modern networks due to their size and high traffic volume with varied quality of service requirements have introduced high control message communications overhead on the controller. Similarly, the solution found using multiple distributed controllers brings forth the ‘controller placement problem’ (CPP). Incorporating switch roles in the CPP modelling during network partitioning for controller placement has not been adequately considered by any existing CPP techniques. This article proposes the controller placement algorithm with network partition based on critical switch awareness (CPCSA). CPCSA identifies critical switch in the software defined wide area network (SDWAN) and then partition the network based on the criticality. Subsequently, a controller is assigned to each partition to improve control messages communication overhead, loss, throughput, and flow setup delay. The CPSCSA experimented with real network topologies obtained from the Internet Topology Zoo. Results show that CPCSA has achieved an aggregate reduction in the controller’s overhead by 73%, loss by 51%, and latency by 16% while improving throughput by 16% compared to the benchmark algorithms.