Traffic-aware adaptive server load balancing for software defined networks

Servers in data center networks handle heterogenous bulk loads. Load balancing, therefore, plays an important role in optimizing network bandwidth and minimizing response time. A complete knowledge of the current network status is needed to provide a stable load in the network. The process of network status catalog in a traditional network needs additional processing which increases complexity, whereas, in software defined networking, the control plane monitors the overall working of the network continuously. Hence it is decided to propose an efficient load balancing algorithm that adapts SDN. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm TA-ASLB-traffic-aware adaptive server load balancing to balance the flows to the servers in a data center network. It works based on two parameters, residual bandwidth, and server capacity. It detects the elephant flows and forwards them towards the optimal server where it can be processed quickly. It has been tested with the Mininet simulator and gave considerably better results compared to the existing server load balancing algorithms in the floodlight controller. After experimentation and analysis, it is understood that the method provides comparatively better results than the existing load balancing algorithms

Scalable Load Balancing Scheme for Distributed Controllers in Software Defined Data Centers

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Load Balancing Mechanisms in the Software Defined Networks: A Systematic and Comprehensive Review of the Literature

With the expansion of the network and increasing their users, as well as emerging new technologies, such as cloud computing and big data, managing traditional networks is difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to change the traditional network architecture. Lately, to address this issue, a notion named software-defined network (SDN) has been proposed, which makes network management more conformable. Due to limited network resources and to meet the requirements of quality of service, one of the points that must be considered is load balancing issue that serves to distribute data traffic among multiple resources in order to maximize the efficiency and reliability of network resources. Load balancing is established based on the local information of the network in the conventional network. Hence, it is not very precise. However, SDN controllers have a global view of the network and can produce more optimized load balances. Although load balancing mechanisms are important in the SDN, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no precise and systematic review or survey on investigating these issues. Hence, this paper reviews the load balancing mechanisms which have been used in the SDN systematically based on two categories, deterministic and non-deterministic. Also, this paper represents benefits and some weakness regarded of the selected load balancing algorithms and investigates the metrics of their algorithms. In addition, the important challenges of these algorithms have been reviewed, so better load balancing techniques can be applied by the researchers in the future. © 2018 IEEE