An Overview of P4-Based Load Balancing Mechanism in SDN

Ruelas A.M.R.; Ccorimanya J.Q.; Barra M.A.Q. · Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies (2023) · DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-31007-2_17

Resumen

The growth of network traffic due to emerging technologies, such as 5G, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and the Internet of Things (IoT), allows an increase in connections for users and electronic devices to data centers. As a consequence, this evolution affects the quality of service and the availability of data center resources and services for users, due to bottlenecks created when servers do not respond with suitable speed to user requests. In this paper, four load-balancing mechanisms (connection hashing, random, round-robin, and weighted round-robin) that use the P4 programming language are proposed. Currently, network infrastructures and computing systems rely heavily on load balancing to allocate resources among multiple systems. The load balancing methods herein discussed are stateful, which means that P4 switches store information locally to perform load balancing. Some methods, such as round robin and weighted round robin, use active polling to obtain network performance indicators.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional del Altiplano