Leveraging SDN for Load Balancing on Campus Network (CN)

The next-generation campus network (CN) is turning into a complex network with a growing number of users, applications, wired and wireless devices. Therefore, to support all the connectivity modes and user demands CN needs to shift from a static, inflexible to a dynamic, flexible, and automated behavior. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides flexible network management through its programmable feature and layered architecture. Deployment of multi-controller enhances availability, scalability and brought in a new idea of load sharing between switches and controllers. The CN has thousands of internal, external, and remote users communicating with the network infrastructure. To address the above issues, this article presents SDN based load balancing strategy for campus Networks. Firstly, this article presents an overview of the SDN- based CN framework. Then discuss the conceptual design of a bi-fold load balancing module to shape traffic spikes in SDN-based CN framework. The bi-fold load balancing module consists of dynamic round-robin scheduling for switch load balancing and fractional flow request migration for controller load balancing. This paper proposes a novel load balancing module integrated into SDN-based CN framework.