Enhanced Load Balancing and QoS Provisioning Algorithm for a Software Defined Network

This work aims to load balance the links in a software defined network(SDN) effectively and allow the existence of QoS demanding flows in the network. Inside a modern data center, the majority of the traffic congestion is caused by traffic within the switches inside the data center. These switches have to be programmed manually for computing new switch paths and re-routing the traffic. However, in a software defined network all the switches are controlled by a centralized controller. Hence the ability to detect congestion and load balance the links of the network can be programmed easily from the controller to all the switches. The current approaches to load balance the network using an SDN controller do not give importance to the presence of QoS flows in the network while computing paths and re-routing traffic. Also, they do not use the group table feature of the switch to balance the network. In order to overcome these limitations, an Enhanced Load Balancing and QoS provisioning algorithm(ELBQ) is proposed.