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uLoBal: Enabling In-Network Load Balancing for Arbitrary Internet Services on SDN

Authors:
Alex F R Trajano
Marcial P Fernandez

Keywords: Load Balancing; Software-Defined Networking; Internet Services.

Abstract:
Today's networks should support the increasing demand required by large workloads generated by users who consume several types of service over the Internet. However, the users demand increases at a much higher rate than the networks can evolve due to a number of constraints, including economic reasons. Thus, it is a common practice to adopt load balancing in order to use network resources more efficiently. Although load balancers are an effective way of improving current networks, most of the existing implementations are based on hardware products and dedicated to specific types of services, which is not a good alternative due to the highly dynamic nature of the Internet. In order to address the nature of today's networks, the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides an architecture that allows the network to be fully programmable, opening the possibility of implementing such load balancing mechanisms on top of a network controller that provides optimal management of resources. This paper presents uLoBal, an SDN-based load balancer that is able of performing flexible and generic load balancing of arbitrary services through the use of manageable forwarding algorithms that address most of the service types and natures. uLoBal is efficient to load balance services on unstructured networks by considering both network and servers' load metrics. The proposal was evaluated in the Mininet emulation environment and shows an improvement on load balancing, providing better use of network resources and user experience.

Pages: 62 to 67

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: February 21, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4413

ISBN: 978-1-61208-450-3

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 21, 2016 to February 25, 2016