Traffic Engineering with SDN : Optimising traffic Load-Balancing with OpenFlow

Abstract: The advent of trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, IoT and BYOD has increased the traffic loads on modern enterprise and data-center networks. As the requirements on today’s networks increase, newer designs and solutions have sprout forth. Software-Defined Networking was developed to cater to the needs of modern networks and to improve traffic handling among other things. This study focuses on the ways SDN, specifically the OpenFlow standard, can be used to load-balance and increase the network throughput, in comparison to traditional methods such as Equal-Cost Load-Balancing. This was done by creating a test environment with the network emulator Mininet, and by creating load-balancing programs. The load-balancers were created using the OpenFlow protocol. These programs were used together with the Floodlight controller and were compared in the same environment. The results showed that the bandwidth load-balancer outperformed the Equal-Cost Load-Balancer.