Load Balancing and Energy Efficient Routing in Software-Defined Networking

Software-defined networking (SDN), a newly developed architecture that alters the route (paths) of traffic packets, is a flexible and logically centralized control plane that provides a reduction in the network’s energy usage. SDN is designed in such a way that the switches and links can handle a large amount of traffic. Their energy use is not proportional to traffic. Due to the increase in network communication, SDN devices demand much more load and energy. The SDN controller has to be modeled efficiently. The system model of the controller is proposed which efficiently distributes the load. This model helps in traffic routing with minimal energy consumption for networking devices. In addition to the above, it balances the load based on the heterogeneous traffic distribution. The proposed method optimizes the energy consumed by the networking devices by means of using the few active switches, minimizing the number of device state transitions, and handling the volume of traffic. Load balancing is performed for multiple controllers. The switch migration technique is used for migrating the traffic from one controller to the other. Energy-efficient routing is done by the proposed algorithm with reduced device state transition.