Open flow-based server load balancing using improved server health reports

Due to the exponential growth of network users and applications, data center networks are facing the challenge of balancing the workloads. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a good candidate for solving the challenge as it provides the flexibility for each user by giving the programmatic control of each flow. However, previous load balancing strategies based on OpenFlow protocol do not consider the health of the servers in finding out the right server to distribute the load, which is critical to reduce the response time of service requests. In this work, we propose EHLBOF, a novel load balancing strategy to distribute the traffic dynamically using enhanced server health report. Experimental results demonstrate that EHLBOF outperforms the widely used load balancing strategy Round Robin (RR) by improving the throughput 47.39%.