Revolutionizing Data Center Networks: Dynamic Load Balancing via Floodlight in SDN Environment

In the digital era, the evolution of big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and quantum computing demands a preferable networking infrastructure to handle network expansion and network usage optimally. In traditional Data Center Networks (DCNs), bundling of control and data plane in the same networking device limits its functionality for dynamic computation and storage access. The load balancing developed in traditional network infrastructure is not precise, as it is based on the local information of the network. Due to existing static routing mechanisms in traditional networks, most of the network resources are still underutilized. This dissipation of network assets is becoming common in today’s traditional typical networks. SDN emerges as a new platform that promises to control, change, and manage the inherent services of networking nodes by extracting statistics from lower layers of the network topology, facilitating network engineers and administrators. Load balancing in SDN offers a fair load share between network nodes, optimizing the best path along with bandwidth and reducing latency. SDN offers a global view of the whole network in one place, a centralized controller while helping in making satisfactory and upright decisions. In this paper, an SDN-based controller, Floodlight, is chosen for the implementation of dynamic load balancing. The Dijkstra’s algorithm is exercised in our application running on the controller. A data center network, FatTree topology of open flow switches, is deployed to depict the real-life traffic complexity in a data center network. To create a virtual topology of nodes, a Mininet emulation platform is utilized. Different load-balancing verification mechanisms validate that our load- balancing technique is doing a splendid piece of work.