Traffic Optimization with Software-Defined Network Controller on a New User Interface

• Published in: J.UCS (Annual print and CD-ROM archive ed.) Vol. 28; no. 6; pp. 648 - 669
• Main Author: Yiltas-Kaplan, Derya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol Pensoft Publishers 01.01.2022; Graz University of Technology
• Subjects: Algorithms; Auction algorithm; Bellman-Ford; Communication; Computer networks; Computing time; Controllers; Dual ascent; Floo; Floodlighting; Mathematical optimization; Network management systems; Optimization; Routing (telecommunications); Software; Software-defined networking; Switches; Topology; User interface; Virtual private networks
• ISSN: 0948-695X; 0948-6968; 0948-6968
• DOI: 10.3897/jucs.80625

Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a solution to the cumbersome structures of classical computer networks. It separates control and data planes to give independence to devices with respect to either traffic routing or network management. The two isolated planes communicate with each other via the help of software modules, which are located in an SDN controller, such as Floodlight, NOX, or Ryu. In this study, Floodlight is used and an SDN topology with 20 switches is constructed with Python code in Mininet. All algorithms have been coded with Java. The default routing algorithm in Floodlight is Dijkstra's algorithm. Four different network optimization algorithms, namely Bellman-Ford, Ford-Fulkerson, Auction, and Dual Ascent algorithms, are utilized in ordinary network routing instead of Dijkstra's algorithm. None of these four algorithms were used in SDN before and network implementations using Ford-Fulkerson, Auction, or Dual Ascent algorithms were scarce in the literature. The results are analyzed with multiple types of normalization on a new user interface communicating with Floodlight part via HTTP requests. There has not been a user interface that performs the same operations in Floodlight. In the future, this study may possibly be improved with considering normalization processes based on various proportions among the metric values and accounting the computational time of the algorithms.