Legacy heterogeneous network paradigm have reached the extremity where its competence to accustom to dynamic situation has become a hindrance. These traditional network platforms are very complicated to manage due to various challenges like interoperability, upgrade which require protocols and management techniques hard-coded into the underlying network platform. Software Defined Network is an emerging network architecture which allows automation of infrastructure configuration enabling the network operators to adapt their network to meet the real time application requirements. Now-a-days with the frequent and rapid inflation of number of clients associated with the network, it is very important to distribute the incoming request equally among all the servers. So by taking advantage of the overall view of the network by the controller, various load balancing strategies can be used to distribute the request in order to increase the overall performance of the system. Every load balancing technique has some pros and cons. This paper gives the comprehensive critical survey on various load balancing strategies used in SDN technology.

Software Defined Networking, Load Balancing, Openflow

[1] Kreutz, Diego, et al. "Software-defined networking: A comprehensive survey." Proceedings of the IEEE 103.1 (2015): 14-76.
[2] Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "OpenFlow: The next generation of the network?" Computer 44.8 (2011): 13-15.
[3] A. Voellmy and J. Wang, “Scalable software defined network controllers,” SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 289–290, Aug. 2012.
[4] Serverwatch.com, “5 Load Balancers You Need to Know,”2015.
[5] “Load-Balancing: Hash Methods,” Calix, 2010.
[6] Koerner, Marc, and Odej Kao. "Multiple service load-balancing with OpenFlow." High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), 2012 IEEE 13th International Conference on.IEEE, 2012.
[7] Sherwood, Rob, et al. "Flowvisor: A network virtualization layer." OpenFlow Switch Consortium, Tech. Rep 1 (2009): 132.
[8] Zhou, Yuanhao, et al. "A method for load balancing based on software defined network." Advanced Science and Technology Letters 45 (2014): 43-48.
[9] Kaur, Sukhveer, et al. "Round-robin based load balancing in Software Defined Networking." Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2015 2nd International Conference on. IEEE, 2015.
[10] Ghaffarinejad, Ashkan, and Violet R. Syrotiuk. "Load balancing in a campus network using software defined networking." Research and Educational Experiment Workshop (GREE), 2014 Third GENI. IEEE, 2014.
[11] Qilin, Mao, and Shen Weikang. "A load balancing method based on SDN." Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation (ICMTMA), 2015 Seventh International Conference on. IEEE, 2015.
[12] Sabiya, and Jaspinder Singh. “Weighted Round-Robin Load Balancing Using Software Defined Networking.” International Journal Of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering, vol. 6, no. 6, June 2016, pp. 621–625.
[13] Kaur, Karamjeet, Sukhveer Kaur, and Vipin Gupta. "Flow statistics based load balancing in OpenFlow." Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), 2016 International Conference on. IEEE, 2016.
[14] Selvi, Hakan, Gürkan Gür, and Fatih Alagöz. "Cooperative load balancing for hierarchical SDN controllers." High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), 2016 IEEE 17th International Conference on. IEEE, 2016.
[15] Sufiev, Hadar, and Yoram Haddad. "A dynamic load balancing architecture for SDN." Science of Electrical Engineering (ICSEE), IEEE International Conference on the. IEEE, 2016.
[16] Zhou, Yuanhao, et al. "A load balancing strategy of sdn controller based on distributed decision." Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2014 IEEE 13th International Conference on. IEEE, 2014.
[17] Blial, Othmane, Mouad Ben Mamoun, and Redouane Benaini. "An overview on SDN architectures with multiple controllers." Journal of Computer Networks and Communications 2016 (2016).
[18] Yu, Jinke, et al. "A load balancing mechanism for multiple SDN controllers based on load informing strategy." Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS), 2016 18th Asia-Pacific.IEEE, 2016.
[19] Sroya, Manamrit Singh, and Vikramjit Singh. "LDDWRR: Least Delay Dynamic Weighted Round-Robin Load Balancing in Software Defined Networking." International Journal 8.5 (2017).
[20] Chen-Xiao, Cui, and Xu Ya-Bin. "Research on load balance method in SDN." International Journal of Grid and Distributed Computing 9.1 (2016): 25-36.