Load Balancing Techniques in Software-Defined Cloud Computing: an overview

Abstract

With the expansion of the network and increasing their users, as well as emerging new technologies, such as cloud computing and big data, managing traditional networks is difficult, where the VM load has increased as well as the required task processing time. Therefore, it is necessary to change the traditional network architecture. Lately, to address this issue, a notion named software-defined network (SDN) has been proposed, which makes network management more conformable. Network resources limitations and requirements fulfilment leads to the important need of load balancing that helps in distributing traffic via several resources to improve network resources efficiency and reliability. Many researchers have worked previously on this task, proposing several algorithms with advantages and disadvantages. This paper focuses on cloud computing load balancing concepts, and represents benefits and some weaknesses regarding to the selected load balancing algorithms and investigates the metrics of their algorithms. In addition, the important challenges of these algorithms have been reviewed to provide future researchers with better load balancing techniques.