Joint server and route selection in SDN networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new paradigm proposed to meet the requirements of new networking concepts such as cloud computing and data center networking. SDN decouples control and data planes and uses a logically centralized controller to manage the underlying network resources. In this paper, a joint server and route selection mechanism is proposed for SDN networks, where current and past statistics of network resource utilization are taken into account to allocate a server and a corresponding routing path for each incoming flow. The proposed mechanism periodically and automatically updates the link cost metrics of link state routing protocol to achieve the load balancing in the network. The proof of concept has been implemented using Mininet to emulate OpenFlow enabled switches and OpenDaylight as an SDN controller. Using the real IP traffic, we successfully demonstrated that the proposed system evenly distributes traffic flows among network links and servers.