An adaptive load balancing scheme for software-defined network controllers

Software-defined networking (SDN) is considered as one of the promising paradigms for the future Internet. It allows users to configure the network depending on the application-level requirements. One of the major challenges in SDN is the uneven distribution of traffic load in the controllers that degrades system performance. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptive load balancing (SALB) scheme that balances load among multiple controllers dynamically with multiple switch migration from source controllers to target controllers. The key feature of our scheme is an effective distribution of load under high load condition while considering the distance between switches and target controllers simultaneously. The efficacy of our proposed scheme is demonstrated through experimentation, where we compare our scheme with existing approaches. The results show that SALB experiences a small number of packet drops, which is less than 1.23% of the total number of message exchanges among the controllers. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.