Traffic pattern–based load‐balancing algorithm in software‐defined network using distributed controllers

Summary Programmability and decoupling of the data plane and control plane in software‐defined networking (SDN) make the enterprise's network to focus on this new paradigm and to deploy their applications on it. Furthermore, supporting of distributed controllers in SDN opens the opportunities to address the limitations of centralized controller's architecture, which in turn improves the overall performance of the network. This study proposes a new load‐balancing algorithm to handle the load based on the traffic pattern specifically transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic. Additionally, this study uses a distributed SDN controller's architecture to host the load balancer application. This study also employs a failover mechanism on the distributed architecture to achieve high‐availability environment and to ensure the redundancy and reliability of the network. The obtained results prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of availability, which is increased by 11%, response time is reduced by 98%, transaction rate is also increased by 258%, throughput is increased by 206%, concurrency is reduced by 63%, and packet loss is reduced by 86% while comparing with random, round‐robin, and weighted round‐robin algorithms in addition to ease the integration and deployment in distributed controllers. In this paper, it was found that load balancing based on UDP and TCP traffic patterns is suitable for dynamic network that generates heterogeneous traffic and needs to obtain high availability, low response time, higher transactions rate, high throughput, less concurrency, and packet loss.