Improved Extended Dijkstra’s Algorithm for Software Defined Networks

Abstract

The existing Extended Dijkstra's algorithm for Software Defined Networks was developed to handle shortcomings associated with the traditional shortest path routing used in SDN. Today's SDN controllers route allocation mechanism is mainly based on Dijkstra algorithm. However, both approaches do not consider bandwidth utilization and do not take knowledge of the topology into consideration. This may result in network congestion and sub-optimal performance of applications. This paper presents a modified Extended Dijkstra's algorithm for Software Defined Networks using REST APIs and introduces a congestion control component responsible for handling traffic overhead in an SDN topology. The Abilene network topology was used to evaluate the performance of both approaches using throughput and latency as performance metrics.