MPTCP Based Load Balancing Mechanism in Software Defined Satellite Networks

The instability of satellite network links, unbalanced user distribution, and limited resources have caused severe network congestion and load imbalance. To address this problem, we propose a load balancing mechanism based on Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and apply it to software defined satellite networks (SDSN). This mechanism obtains the topology and the state of the whole network through the monitoring function of controller, and then selects k shortest paths from all available paths. It first divides the flow into several subflows according to the cost of different paths, and then establishes the MPTCP connection. To improve the efficiency of the network, we install OpenFlow rules to each switch. In the end, we conduct experiments in the Mininet simulation platform. The results show that the proposed mechanism can achieve load balancing of different links and improve the throughput while reducing delay.