A new approach for server-based load balancing using software-defined networking

The traditional load balancers suffer from inflexibility and difficulty to manage network flows and they are very expensive hardware dedicated devices. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) gives a promising solution for traditional load balancer limitations. SDN is a new paradigm which enables programmability and centralized control for the network which offers inexpensive and flexible solutions. This paper aims to develop a new load balancing approach using SDN. We propose a “Bandwidth-based” load balancing approach that distributes the network requests among multiple servers based on the servers' bandwidth consumption. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared with different load balancing schemes (Round-robin and Connections-based) under a mininet emulation and a Raspberry Pi-based implementation. Emulation and hardware implementation results reveal a better performance of the proposed approach compared to the two reference schemes.