LABERIO: Dynamic load-balanced routing in OpenFlow-enabled networks

In data center networks, how to balance workloads is a key issue with the fast growth of network applications. OpenFlow protocol, which is a competitive candidate for solving the problem, provides each user the programmatic control for specific flows, so as to determine their paths through a network. However, existing solutions based on OpenFlow only try to find a static routing path during initialization step while the static routing path often suffers from poor performance since the network configuration may change during the data transmission. To solve the problem, this paper proposes LABERIO, a novel path-switching algorithm, to balance the traffic dynamically during the transmission. Experiments on two kinds of network architectures demonstrate that LABERIO outperform other typical load balancing algorithms like Round Robin and LOBUS by reducing up to 13% transmission time.