Load Balance Strategy In Software-Defined Equal-Cost Multipath Routing Networks

Equal-Cost Multipath Routing(ECMP)is a routing protocol for network environments in which multiple paths exist between each pair of source-destination nodes especially in Data Center Networks(DCN)and Wireless Mesh Networks(WMN).Compared to established routing protocols such as OSPF and IS-IS in which data packets destined to a specific destination address take only one of the available paths while others being backup or invalid,ECMP simultaneously utilizes all possible paths to increase network throughput meanwhile providing a precondition for load balance strategy.Software Defined Networks(SDN)has been regarded as an effective emerging technology in practicing load balance strategies in ECMP.SDN controller is configured with a global view to assign incoming data flows among multiple paths by sending flow tables to OpenFlow switches based on dynamic traffic load in order to avoid networks congestion.We propose two algorithms in SDN enabled networks: Dynamic Multipath Routing Control(DMRC)and Traffic Balancing with Awareness of Radio Interference and Wireless Link Rate(TBIR).In DMRC,each path from a source node to a destination node is encoded with a sophisticated designed binary path ID,which compresses the number of entries in routing tables in OpenFlow switches.In TBIR,a novel multichannel wireless networks architecture is proposed to utilize discrete radio frequency and increase network throughput.Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithms outperform other load balance strategies in terms of networks throughput and end-to-end delay.