Flow monitoring scheme for reducing congestion and packet loss in software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new approach in network architecture which decouples the control plane from data plane. The SDN controller has the global view of the underlying network, enabling enormous research works in the area of traffic engineering (TE). Existing congestion control solutions for SDN TE are either reactive or proactive in nature. In reactive schemes when congestion event occurs the source is informed which then reacts by rate adjustment and in proactive scheme pre computation of protection path demands additional resources. We propose a proactive flow monitoring method to reduce congestion and packet loss in SDN. This technique reduces packet loss by automatically re-routing congested link's traffic through a dynamically computed alternate path. Simulation result shows that proposed scheme reduces average packet loss leading to overall increase in network efficiency.