Optimized load balancing using software-defined networking (SDN)

Abstract

In a cloud environment, handling user service requests and providing the requested resources fairly is critical. Load balancing is important to distribute service requests fairly to an unloaded server and to dynamically maintain load balancing across server farms. In conventional internet protocol (IP) networks, maintaining load balancing is a stubborn and non-adaptable task due to the forwarders' lack of global topology representation. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides centralized decision-making for any topological changes to manage changes dynamically. To solve the above problem, we propose a new server-side load balancing strategy that provides an efficient and effective server management scheme for SDN Open Flow networks. Experiments were done on the Ryu controller and the Mininet emulator showed that the performance was better than what was already available.