6. Analysis of Load Balancing Techniques in Software-Defined Networking

An abrupt increase in the workload can be observed nowadays in every aspect of business approach, e.g., e-commerce, financial industry, advertising industry, social networking websites, etc. This surge in the rate of workload traffic can influence the congestion problems, resulting into breakage of various services committed to the end user. To avoid this situation, Cloud, Edge computing approaches are used to handle the workload in an efficient manner. At cloud layer, there are an abundance of resources to handle the workload from the various end devices/users. The data centers (DCs) are centralized at fixed locations, and therefore, latency can be observed while transmitting the workload from end user to the DCs. To overcome the latency issue, a geo-distributed technology, known as edge computing, was introduced to handle the requests of the end users. Whenever, the workload is transmitted from one location to another location, network traffic can be a challenging issue, which further can create bottleneck in the network. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is the platform by using which the network can be controlled centrally in an efficient manner. The resources are limited in edge computing, and therefore limited services can be provided to the end users. The service provider also interested to provide the services using resources at the edge layer. Due to this, the workload on the resources may not be saturated. To use the resources at its best, in this chapter, different load balancing and routing techniques are discussed thoroughly to handle the generated workload using SDN envisioned environment.