Coalition-Based Web Server Load Balancing in Software Defined Network

Software Defined Network(SDN) is a paradigm, which defines new architecture for network management. In traditional networking, the network is managed by dedicated net $\neg$ working devices. These devices have tightly coupled control plane and data plane. And generally proprietary in nature. For load balancing, traditional networks use an expensive hardware device. But in the case of SDN, only a new load balancing application is needed to install at the controller. This application uses APIs provided by the controller to build logic for load balancing. Here this paper proposes a game theory-based load-balancing application. It uses concepts of the coalition from cooperative game theory to build the logic of load balancing. The coalition build is based on the hosts connected to a particular OpenFlow switch, i.e. close proximity. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared to a round-robin load balancing scheme under a Mininet emulated environment. Experimental evaluations in a Mininet-emulated environment demonstrate that the proposed method improves throughput by up to 19% compared to the round-robin method under peak loads. Additionally, the proposed method reduces average response time by up to 6%, while also minimizing network congestion and traffic, outperforming the round-robin scheme in overall performance.