HybridFlow: Achieving Load Balancing in Software-Defined WANs With Scalable Routing

The scalability issue hinders the deployment of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in the Wide Area Networks (WANs). Existing solutions have two issues: (1) network performance relies on complicated controller synchronization, which increases the complexity of network control; (2) fine-grained flow p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on communications 2021-08, Vol.69 (8), p.5255-5268
Main Authors: Guo, Zehua, Dou, Songshi, Wang, Yi, Liu, Sen, Feng, Wendi, Xu, Yang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Control systems
Controllers
crucial flow
Flow control
Load balancing
Load management
Load modeling
Network control
Occupancy
Process control
Rerouteing
Routing
Scalability
Software-defined networking
Switches
Synchronism
Synchronization
Wide area networks
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Summary:The scalability issue hinders the deployment of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in the Wide Area Networks (WANs). Existing solutions have two issues: (1) network performance relies on complicated controller synchronization, which increases the complexity of network control; (2) fine-grained flow processing enables flexible flow control at the cost of high processing load on the controllers and high flow table occupancy on switches. In this paper, we propose a scalable routing solution named HybridFlow, which achieves a good load balancing performance using a single controller with low control overhead (i.e., flow routing and rerouting overhead). HybridFlow mainly employs two techniques: hybrid routing and crucial flow rerouting . Hybrid routing enabled by commercial SDN switches gives us opportunities to reduce the processing load of the controller by routing flows with the hybrid OpenFlow/OSPF mode. Thus, the majority of flows can be routed by OSPF without involving the controller. Crucial flow rerouting realizes load balancing by dynamically identifying crucial flows based on a new metric called Variation Slope and rerouting these flows with the hybrid OpenFlow/OSPF mode. The simulation based on the real traffic traces and network typologies shows that compared with the optimal solution, HybridFlow can achieve 87% of the optimal load balancing performance by rerouting 36% less flows on average.
ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3074500