Energy-aware dynamic-link load balancing method for a software-defined network using a multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm and genetic operators

Information and communication technology (ICT) is one of the sectors that have the highest energy consumption worldwide. It implies that the use of energy in the ICT must be controlled. A software-defined network (SDN) is a new technology in computer networking. It separates the control and data planes to make networks more programmable and flexible. To obtain maximum scalability and robustness, load balancing is essential. The SDN controller has full knowledge of the network. It can perform load balancing efficiently. Link congestion causes some problems such as long transmission delay and increased queueing time. To overcome this obstacle, the link load balancing strategy is useful. The link load-balancing problem has the nature of NP-complete; therefore, it can be solved using a meta-heuristic approach. In this study, a novel energy-aware dynamic routing method is proposed to solve the link load-balancing problem while reducing power consumption using the multiobjective artificial bee colony algorithm and genetic operators. The simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme has improved packet loss rate, round trip time and jitter metrics compared with the basic ant colony, genetic-ant colony optimisation, and round-robin methods. Moreover, it has reduced energy consumption. © 2020 Institution of Engineering and Technology. All rights reserved

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

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