A Proactive Flow Admission and Re-Routing Scheme for Load Balancing and Mitigation of Congestion Propagation in SDN Data Plane

Abstract

The centralized architecture in software-defined network (SDN) provides a global view of the underlying network, paving the way for enormous research in the area of SDN traffic engineering (SDN TE). This research focuses on the load balancing aspects of SDN TE, given that the existing reactive methods for data-plane load balancing eventually result in packet loss and proactive schemes for data plane load balancing do not address congestion propagation. In the proposed work, the SDN controller periodically monitors flow level statistics and utilization on each link in the network and over-utilized links that cause network congestion and packet loss are identified as bottleneck links. For load balancing the identified largest flow and further traffic through these bottleneck links are rerouted through the lightly-loaded alternate path. The proposed scheme models a Bayesian Network using the observed port utilization and residual bandwidth to decide whether the newly computed alternate path can handle the new flow load before flow admission which in turn reduces congestion propagation. The simulation results show that when the network traffic increases the proposed method efficiently re-routes the flows and balance the network load which substantially improves the network efficiency and the quality of service (QoS) parameters.

A Reliable Load Balancing Fault Tolerant Multi-SDN Controller approach in a typical Software Defined Network

“…The SDN architecture is centralized, focus is on traffic engineering load balancing in data plane. In [10],bayesian network scheme is used to choose alternate path but no multi-controller scenario is used considering the standard network topologies to reduce the SDN controller overhead. Sminesh et al [25], in their work partitioned the network using a modified-Affinity Propogation (AP) clustering algorithm and provides the input by calculating the distance between switch and other components, as well as uses link bandwidth between each .There is no mechanism of load balancing w.r.t server or the response time.No involvement of any external controllers like Mininet is involved, so the network traffic, performance could be analyzed.…”

Integration of Interdomain Flow-Rule in Software-Defined Networks for Embedded Internet of Things Devices

“…In SDN, the packet transmission rules are stored and managed in a flow-table inside the switch. Various schemes have been developed for managing flow information for the improvement of the ability of the network [5,6]. Figure 1 demonstrates the flow-table and the flow-entry fields stored inside the flow-table.…”

“…On the other hand, the flow-rules are installed into the flow-table in advance in a proactive approach as a network operation begins. The proactive approach can reduce the overhead in the communication between the controllers and switches [4][5][6]. Some more degradation issues related to the SDN performance are (i) topology changes, (ii) network reconfiguration, and iii) re-routing rules creation.…”