Round-robin based load balancing in Software Defined Networking

These days our networks have to handle large amount of traffic, serve thousands of clients. It is very difficult for a single server to handle such huge load. The solution is to use multiple servers with load balancer acting as a front end. The clients will send the requests to the load balancer. The load balancer will forward the client requests to different servers depending upon load balancing strategy. Load balancer use dedicated hardware. That hardware is expensive and inflexible. Currently available load balancers contain few algorithms that can be used. Network administrators can not create their own algorithms since traditional load balancer are vendor locked, non programmable. On the other hand SDN load balancers are programmable and allow you to design and implement your own load balancing strategy. Other advantages of SDN load balancer is we do not need dedicated hardware. The dumb silicon device can be converted to a powerful load balancer by using SDN controllers. In this paper we are implementing and comparing Round-Robin load balancing strategy with already implemented random strategy using an OpenFlow switch connected to a POX controller.