Enhancing throughput and load balancing in software-defined networks

Software Defined Networks decouples the control plane and data plane of a network. Using the capabilities of SDN a network manager can enhance the performance, efficiency and throughput of a network. Traditional networks cannot resourcefully utilize a mesh topology or a topology having multiple paths available. In this paper we used two different approaches to utilize a multi-path topology; the forwarding strategy which we used is a proactive strategy which assigns different flows over multiple paths. We also performed experiments to measure throughput and the impact on performance by increasing the TCP window size. It was observed that increasing TCP window size with 5000 bytes improved performance minimum of 11.11% and maximum of 20% in terms of data transfer.