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SDN-based server clusters with dynamic load balancing and performance improvement

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Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a state-of-the-art architectural approach to network management that allows more flexible management of a complicated large-scale network. For providing services with high performance, availability, and scalability, server clustering is widely used. This study develops a server cluster based on OpenFlow, which is the most common SDN protocol. To utilize cluster resources effectively, this study focuses on the server-side load-balancing issue and increases the performance for a cluster of servers with different processing capabilities. We have proposed a novel load balancing algorithm, named dynamic weighted random selection (DWRS). DWRS considers the real-time server loads when dispatching requests to servers. Underutilized servers are assigned higher weights, so they have a higher possibility of being selected to process requests. To increase system performance, we modify the flow of packet handling in the Floodlight controller. A multi-threaded technique is used to effectively utilize the parallel processing capability of multiple cores, which speeds up the processing of packet-in messages when selecting the target server. This prevents the controller from becoming overloaded, especially when a large number of packet-in messages arrive. To demonstrate effectiveness and feasibility, we deploy our experimental environment using real hardware, instead of using Mininet to set up a virtual SDN testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed DWRS with multi-threaded implementation outperforms other policies, especially in a heterogeneous environment.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grant MOST 107-2221-E-260-005 and 108-2221-E-260-005 from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, Republic of China. We also thank Y. Z. Yi for his assistance in performing experiments. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments in improving this research.

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  1. Department of Information Management, National Chi Nan University, Puli, Nantou, Taiwan, ROC

    Mei-Ling Chiang, Hui-Sheng Cheng, Hsien-Yi Liu & Ching-Yi Chiang

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  1. Mei-Ling Chiang
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  2. Hui-Sheng Cheng
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Chiang, ML., Cheng, HS., Liu, HY. et al. SDN-based server clusters with dynamic load balancing and performance improvement. Cluster Comput 24, 537–558 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-020-03135-w

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