Least Time Based Weighted Load Balancing Using Software Defined Networking

Abstract

The network is changing very rapidly due to Software Defined Networking. To properly implement networks, we need many network devices like routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls and intrusion detection (IDS)/prevention (IPS). In traditional networking, these devices are very costly, inflexible & vendor specific. All these devices are made up of data plane & control plane. These planes are tightly coupled. You cannot force the vendors to sell you only the data plane so that you can use control plane of your choice. But SDN is changing this by separating the data plane & control plane. Now you can ask for the data plane from the vendor & can use open source control planes such as POX, RYU & Opendaylight. By writing network applications such as load balancer, firewall on top of these control planes, your data plane will start behaving like load balancer or firewall. Thus SDN offers us networking programmability. In our case, we created one load balancing application based on least time based Weighted Round Robin strategy. Load balancers devices are basically used for distributing large amount of client traffic among several servers depending upon load balancing strategy. The various strategies can be round robin, random, weighted round robin or server load balancing. We compared our new load balancing strategy with round robin strategy. For our experimental setup, we used Mininet Emulator Tool & POX Controller as our control plane.