Load Balancing for Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

The societies are changing toward new and advanced directions due to new technological requirements. Flexibility, scalability, reliability, and security play a vital role in the future Internet, thus has to be achieved efficiently, so this inflexibility causes a challenge. Over the past few years, the well-liked topic in the era of networking is Software-defined networking (SDN). This gives rebirth to the programmable networks which/that open a door for new network paradigm. OpenFlow protocol is a basic building block of SDN networks. SDN operates on OpenFlow protocol through which the idea of programmable networks is accomplished. SDN converts the traditional network architecture by separating network logics into two different planes: control plane and data plane. SDN is extended for various applications; this causes imbalanced network utilization. The paper begins by introducing the SDN to this background OpenFlow architecture and SDN architecture is discussed and to examine the existing challenges in SDN. Finally, an emulation of SDN environment is presented using Mininet, which implements load balancing for the SDN with traffic segregation based on input traffic. The results show that solution provided helps to balance the performance of network in terms of Throughput, Delay, and Packet loss that fosters maximized QoS.