Comparison of data center traffic division policies using SDN.

It is estimated that Internet traffic will triple in five years, which will increase server response time. One way to reduce such time is to balance the load on replicated servers using SDN switches. However, existing SDN switches have performance limitations that influence the performance of the load balacing. This work compares five load balancing policies: round robin, random, txbytes (transmitted bytes), cpuq-load (CPU usage and number of open connections), and load/load-prev (load forecast with switch statistics). These policies consider limitations such as the cost to retrieve network statistics and to install new rules. The results show that the txbytes and cpuq-load policies outperformed the others. On the other hand, the load-prev policy proved to be promising when adjusted for traffic.