Multiple service load-balancing with OpenFlow

Abstract

Load balancers have a decisive role in every enterprise network as they serve often as an entry point and have major impact on the performance and the availability of the network. While current load balancers are mostly implemented as specific hardware components, we developed a load balancer service based on the OpenFlow controllers to handle the load of multiple services without the necessity for a specific piece of hardware. This approach integrates the network and the load balancing functionality and reduces the maintenance effort. We increase the efficiency by providing dedicated and thus specifically adapted load balancing algorithms for the involved services. For example one controller handles the standard network traffic between the server nodes and other network components, while another controller handles the load-balancing of the web-servers and another one the load-balancing of e-mail servers. Furthermore experimental measurements in the local OpenFlow island using the FlowVisor and NOX controllers prove the performance capabilities of the developed prototype.