Effect of Load Balancer on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based Cloud

Recent years have seen a tremendous rise in communication and computing devices, and related applications. With this, the need for bandwidth, storage, and computing power has grown exponentially. Many present-day networks have moved towards the cloud for better scalability and to reduce infrastructure cost. Virtualization of network services offers benefits such as multi-tenancy and better asset utilization. However, management and maintenance of clouds and data centers using traditional networking techniques is becoming expensive and complex. Hence, traditional networking is being replaced with software-defined networking (SDN) as it eliminates manual configuration of individual switches, routers, and other network hardware. Integration of SDN with cloud provides better scalability and manageability. The work presented in this paper integrates cloud infrastructure with SDN. Network services such as load balancer and web server are implemented on the cloud. The round-robin job scheduling mechanism is used at the load balancer to allocate the jobs to the web servers. Time taken to process the requests with and without load balancer is analyzed. The obtained results help in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of using load balancers in the developed system.