Dynamic Load Balancing of Cloud Data Center Traffic Based on Software-Defined Networking

Cloud computing has grown rapidly in the last decade, where many tenants are using various cloud applications. Cloud computing users expect and demand to run their applications with the highest performance, reliability, and best quality of service. So, load balancing techniques are essential components and widely used in the cloud data center network to manage users’ requests and distribute applications traffic among available data center resources. Software-defined networking is a highly flexible network architecture that automates network configuration using a centralized controller to overcome the traditional network limitations and manual configuration for every network device. This paper proposes a dynamic load balancing technique using software-defined networking for the cloud data center that can handle different application types in real-time based on traffic type and the required quality of service. The proposed method aims to bridge the gap between application requirements and the resources in the cloud data center by choosing the best path for data transmission and selecting the best performance server to process the users' requests according to traffic type for efficient resources’ utilization, minimizing response time, and maximizing throughput. The simulation results show that the proposed method enhances the performance of the running applications’ and utilizes the data center resources efficiently compared with the current load balancing techniques.