Multipath Routing of Elephant Flows in Data Centers Based on Software Defined Networking

Abstract

The data center networks encompass various cloud services. Network congestion and network load imbalance may occur in data center networks due to elephant flows. In order to improve the throughput and overall utilization of the network, a dynamic load balancing mechanism has to be in place. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is used to perform the balancing of the network load. SDN can obtain the global view of the network and hence contain the status and topology of the entire data center network. The elephant flows can be split and send to multiple paths based on the current state of the network. The described idea is implemented in the OpenFlow environment and tested for improvement. The result shows the enhancement in throughput and network utilization.