An SDN Implemented Adaptive Load Balancing Scheme for�Mobile Networks

Abstract

In the last decade, mobile networks face challenges in providing reliable communication with enhanced performance and quality of service for handling the large volume of heterogeneous traffic. Software-defined networking (SDN) has gained significant attention as an effective deployment platform for the Internet and enterprise networks. In SDN, the separation between the controller (program), and forwarding switches (data) allows configuring network parameters, routing policies on the fly based on changes in application requirements and topologies. Moreover, it allows distributing the traffic load to the controllers that may help users and service providers to run applications with heterogeneous requirements as a pay-per-use basis. In this work, we modeled an SDN integrated adaptive load balancing scheme for mobile networks that efficiently process traffic from multiple nodes simultaneously. The experimentation results indicate that our scheme experiences a less number of packet drops, which is less than 1.3% of the total number of message exchanges among the base stations during the load balancing process. � 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.