Load Balancing in OpenFlow-enabled Switches for Wireless Access Traffic Aggregation

The immense development in mobile devices and the proliferation of ubiquitous cloud-based services have led to a surge in the utilization of remote data centers. These dramatic advances in wireless based services induce a huge traffic flow within the network. However, consequent high load on the network devices may lead to faults and thus an adverse decrease in the user experience. On the other hand, balancing the aggregated multi-flow traffic on ports of network switches is a challenging issue. This work presents a load balancing algorithm implemented in OpenDaylight controller for managing the load on the switch ports by utilizing Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. The switch acts a connector which aggregates traffic from wireless access nodes. An experiment design is constructed with hardware-based OpenFlow-enabled switch and connected wireless hosts. According to the load on the ports, the developed scheme dynamically load-balances the incoming traffic towards the backhaul connection. It uses OpenFlow for gathering statistics and flow rule installation on the switch in an adaptive manner.