Load balancing for software-defined network: a review

Abstract

Software Defined Networks (SDN) concept reduces the complexity of the traditional network. The decentralization of controlling issues of the traditional networks in SDN increases the popularity of this concept, but the difficulty in balancing the load persists in the SDN. If the sharing of the load is not uniform; the performance of the network is affected. Several research issues arise in managing the request of the forwarding devices and providing the correct solutions, these research issues are like traffic monitoring, security, quality of service, and load balancing. Earlier, many load balancing strategies have been proposed for the improvement of the performance of Software Defined Networks. This paper summarizes the research trends and their methodologies for the load balancing in the area of model-based, estimation-based, and nature-inspired algorithms. We have also compared the methodologies used for load balancing.

KEYWORDS:

• Software Defined Networks (SDN)
• OpenFlow
• load balancing
• nature-inspired

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).