SDN based load balancing mechanism for elephant flow in data center networks

Abstract

With various cloud services emerging in data center networks, network congestion and load imbalance are seriously caused by elephant flows. To resolve this problem, a load balancing mechanism based on software defined networking (SDN) for elephant flows is proposed. The mechanism obtains the topology and status of the entire network via global view of SDN. Then it splits and sends elephant flows through multiple paths based on the ratios which are dynamically computed by taking account of the states of links. Finally, the system prototype is implemented in OpenFlow testbed. The results show the proposed mechanism can significantly enhance the performance of the network by improving the network throughput and link utilization.