Dynamic Load Balancing in Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Networks need to handle a huge amount of traffic serving thousands of clients day by day. A single standalone server to cater such a huge load is almost impossible. The solution is to use multiple servers using load balancer at the front end. Traditional Load balancer uses dedicated hardware which forwards the client requests to different servers depending upon load balancing strategy. This sort of hardware is expensive and inflexible. Network administrators cannot create their own algorithms since traditional load balancer are vendor locked, non programmable.This thesis implements a dynamic load balancer which can balance server loads as well as path loads of the network in SDN environment. Moreover, the dynamic load balancer implements customized load balancing strategy. SDN load balancer is programmable and allows to design and implement own customized load balancing strategy. Other advantage of SDN load balancer is that it does not need dedicated hardware. In this thesis, OpenFlow protocol is used for communication in SDN environment. This better manages communication between number of hosts in the network. The result of dynamic load balancer use in this thesis shows that the server load as well as path load are better managed with a better traffic scheduling performance of network. Compared with the traditional load balancing method, this dynamic load balancing effectively improves the performance of the load balancing in the network and reduce the complexity of implementation.