Minimizing the Maximum Link Utilization for Traffic Engineering in SDN: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Software Defined Network modernizes network architecture by supporting scalability, significant flexibility, and programmability. Its functioning has been extended to several areas such as cloud computing, edge computing, enterprise networks, data centers, and the Internet of Things (IoT). It also successfully enhances the functioning of traffic engineering. Traffic engineering involves optimization and dynamic control of traffic flows, minimizing congestion and maximum link utilization, centralized control, and network traffic management. It also enables the effective utilization of resources, boosts the user experience, and increases network performance. Minimizing maximum link utilization implies the distribution of network traffic across respective links or paths to use the offered resources of the network by preventing congestion. Its major goal is to guarantee that none of the individual links gets overloaded. Various approaches have been proposed in the past several years to address this problem. In this article, the state-of-the-art approaches are reviewed and analyzed. The problem formulation of each approach for minimizing the maximum link utilization is detailed with significant importance. The proposed algorithms, its type, and results are also depicted to have a better comparative analysis. Additionally, the type of graph considered while formulating the problem, topologies used to investigate the efficiency of the algorithm, performance metrics, and implementation platforms are listed to have a clear understanding of various approaches.