how load is measured in SDN control plane and how we know controller is overloaded because everything in SDN is programmable, so how can we say overloaded.
M. Belyaev, S. Gaivoronski: “Towards Load Balancing in SDN-Networks during DDoS-attacks”; International Science and Technology Conference (Modern Networking Technologies) (MoNeTeC), Oct 2014
It depends on what you want to consider as a metrics. If you consider the response delay, you should define a threshold for response delay of SDN controller and when the delay will exceed the threshold, it means the Controller is overloaded. Moreover, if you study network modeling, for a given load (L) you can use queue theory for modelling.