Flow statistics based load balancing in OpenFlow

Traditional network devices are not very efficient in handling large amount of web related traffic. All these devices contain tightly coupled control plane plus data plane. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture based on principle of decoupling of these planes. The control plane which is called the brain of network devices is also known as OpenFlow or SDN Controller. By creating SDN applications such as IDS, IPS, load balancer, firewall & router on top of control plane, a simple data plane can be converted into robust network device. We have created a load balancer SDN application which converts the data plane into a powerful load balancer. Load balancers are the network devices which distribute the load among different servers based on particular strategy. The strategy could be random, round robin, weighted round robin. Each strategy has got its own pro & cons. In this paper, we have implemented flow statistics based strategy for our load balancer that runs on top of POX controller. It is written in Python Language. For testing our application, we used a real lab setup up of four computer systems. We compared this application with already available round robin based SDN load balancer application.