Open Access

ARTICLE

Effectively Handling Network Congestion and Load Balancing in Software-Defined Networking

Shabir Ahmad¹, Faisal Jamil², Abid Ali³, Ehtisham Khan⁴, Muhammad Ibrahim², Taeg Keun Whangbo^1,*
1 Department of I.T. Convergence Engineering, Gachon University, Sujeong-Gu, Seongnam-Si, 461-701, Gyeonggi-Do, Korea
2 Department of Computer Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju-Si, 63243, Jeju, Korea
3 University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, 47080, Pakistan
4 The University of Haripur, Haripur, 22620, Pakistan
* Corresponding Author: Taeg Keun Whangbo. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Intelligent Software-defined Networking (SDN) Technologies for Future Generation Networks)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 70(1), 1363-1379. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.017715

Received 08 February 2021; Accepted 24 May 2021; Issue published 07 September 2021

Abstract

The concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) evolves to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional networks with Internet Protocol (I.P.) packets sending and packets handling. The SDN structure is one of the critical advantages of efficiently separating the data plane from the control plane to manage the network configurations and network management. Whenever there are multiple sending devices inside the SDN network, the OpenFlow switches are programmed to handle the limited number of requests for their interface. When the recommendations are exceeded from the specific threshold, the load on the switches also increases. This research article introduces a new approach named LBoBS to handle load balancing by adding the load balancing server to the SDN network. Besides, it is used to maximize SDN’s reliability and efficiency. It also works in coordination with the controller to effectively handle the load balancing policies. The load balancing server is implemented to manage the switches load effectively. Results are evaluated on the NS-3 simulator for packet delivery, bandwidth utilization, latency control, and packet decision ratios on the OpenFlow switches. It has been found that the proposed method improved SDN’s load balancing by 70% compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods.

---

Keywords

SDN; control plane; load balancing; decision tree; CPU utilization

---