Research Of Load Balancing Based On OpenFlow

With the continuous development of network technology, the traffic in network isalso growing rapidly. At the same time, people also have higher requirements to theperformance of network. Although the processing capability of the network equipmenthas made substantial progress in recent year, it still cannot meet the needs of people. Amain reason for this problem is the irrational distribution of the network traffic, someof the network nodes are overloaded, while some nodes are idle. The load balancingtechnology can solve the problem to some extent. By properly distribute the traffic, sothat the efficiency of the entire network is improved. However, due to the limitationsof traditional network architecture, the load balancing cannot implement in a flexibleway.OpenFlow technology is a separation technique which separated the controlplane and the data plane of the network devices. In OpenFlow network, the OpenFlowswitches only have the data plane. The control plane is in the centralized controller.The controller uses the OpenFlow protocol to control the OpenFlow switches, and thedata forwarding is also controlled by the controller. The appearance of OpenFlowtechnology is breaking the shackles of traditional network architecture. The loadbalancing in OpenFlow network can be more flexible.In order to apply the load balancing in OpenFlow network, the first thing is toclear the key issues based on the characteristics of centralized control, they are:metrics of server, metrics of network and the path selection. And a load balancingalgorithm for these three issues is proposed. The algorithm could build a global viewof the network, considering the network status and server status comprehensively.Distribute the traffic rationally by a unified decision-making process, so that the goalof load balancing is reached. And then, the load balancing model according to thealgorithm was designed. The architecture and the workflow of the model weredescribed in detail. Furthermore, the designing ideas of relevant functional modulewere given. At last, the load balancing model has been implemented and tested. Thetest results shown that the load balancing system could achieve the desired objectives.