Title: CoreLB: towards providing multi-metric score-based load balancing using OpenFlow and SNMP

Authors: Rodrigo Da Rosa Righi; Cristiano André Da Costa; Clebio Dossa; Felipe Rabuske; Diego Luis Kreutz

Addresses: Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Tiaraju, 810 – Ibirapuitã, Alegrete – RS, Brazil

Abstract: Load balancing is still one of the most crucial services offered by service providers. In spite of having several load balancing solutions in the market, this area has gained attraction with SDN and OpenFlow. In this article, we present CoreLB, a new load balancing model that takes into account a broader range of metrics from both networking devices and servers to achieve a better balancing of the servers' workload. CoreLB combines statistics of servers, using the SNMP protocol, and forwarding devices, through the OpenFlow protocol. Its scientific contribution is twofold: 1) a novel score-based load balancing metric; 2) a service agnostic metric, i.e., a metric capable of handling the requests of CPU-bound, network-bound and IO-bound services. We evaluated CoreLB through a prototype implementation, which uses web services and handles different types of requests and load balancing scenarios. Our results show that CoreLB provides a better response time from the user's viewpoint. In average, the request processing time has been reduced by 19%, when compared to non-balancing, and 9% when compared other load balancing strategies. In addition, we also achieve an evener resource utilisation when using CoreLB.

Keywords: network management; software-defined networking; SDN; OpenFlow; SNMP load balancing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITCC.2019.106558

International Journal of Information Technology, Communications and Convergence, 2019 Vol.3 No.3, pp.209 - 227

Received: 17 Jun 2017
Accepted: 12 Jan 2018
Published online: 14 Apr 2020 *

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