A Comparative Performance Analysis for Static and Dynamic Load Balancing Techniques in Software Defined Network Environment

Abstract

Traditional load balancer suffers from inflexibility, high cost and the difficulty to manage the network. Software-Defined Network (SDN) gives a promising solution for traditional load balancer limitations through enabling programmability and centralized control over the network, which offers inexpensive and scalable solutions. This paper investigates the impact of increasing the workload requests from 0 up to 180 requests per second (req/sec) in order to explore average network throughput under the deployment of static as well as dynamic load balancing algorithms by the POX controller. The study was based on the utilization of HTTPerf based on the fact that it provides a flexible facility for the generation of various HTTP workloads as well for the measurement of server performance. Our experiments revealed that as the number of requests increases the throughput increases as well. Dynamic least bandwidth-based load balance scheme has shown a remarkable improvement in terms of average network throughput up to 8%, 3.3% and 2.56 %, as compared with static load balancing schemes like random, round-robin and weighted round-robin. However, Dynamic least bandwidth recorded a slight ineffective improvement less than 1 % was recorded when a comparison was carried out dynamic least connections, this directed us to the fact that their performance was almost the same. Based on what dynamic least bandwidth scheme has achieved in terms of average network throughput, more efforts should be driven by the researchers on algorithm development like introducing static weight for each server as well as the application of the algorithm on several POX controllers to avoid a single point of failure.