Congestion control in software defined data center networks through flow rerouting

Nowadays, the performance of data center networks is very important due to hosting different cloud applications and services. The performance of such networks is affected by many factors, like network design and the congestion control mechanism used in the network. Today data center networks have high volume and dynamic traffic due to the deployment of cloud services that make it more challenging to control the congestion in an efficient manner. By the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN), a new horizon opened up for the new generation of data center networks through separation of control and data planes. In this paper we propose an efficient method to control the congestion in the software defined data center networks based on OpenFlow protocol. In our proposed method, congestion in the network links is detected by centrally monitoring the port statistics of the OpenFlow enabled switches and then some of the flows in any congested link are rerouted through paths with more free resources by the OpenFlow controller. We implemented our proposed method by Mininet. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method in decreasing the congestion and improving the performance of the network.