Balanceamento de carga utilizando planos de dados OpenFlow comerciais

Abstract

Software Defined Networks paradigm (SDN) is changing the way how we manage and operate computer networks by its main idea, the decoupling of data and control planes. OpenFlow protocol implements this concept and, due to the advantages of lower operating expenditures and greater ease of adaptation to existing switches projects, it is found today in various network equipment sold by many companies. Using SDN paradigm and OpenFlow protocol, network innovation and evolution are facilitated. Thus, many typical network services can be rethought in order to make them more flexible. An example of such services is load balancing. This work is a study about the feasibility of implementing an OpenFlow load balancer in a real SDN network, considering the restrictions in current commercial OpenFlow equipment. For this, we propose a SDN load balancing which considersdifferentmorerealisticworkloadprofilesandisbasedonusingdifferentpoliciesfor performing the balancing. However, before reproducing this scenario in a real environment, a performance evaluation of some OpenFlow data planes was conducted in order to verify that the current OpenFlow implementations are able to support load balancing or other services in production networks. The quality of different commercial OpenFlow hardware switch implementations and open source software switch implementations was evaluated, using performance metrics in typical operations of an OpenFlow switch. The results show that OpenFlow implementations of the evaluated hardware switches have not yet reached a sufficient level of maturity to be used on a large scale. Despite similar performances between OpenFlow and legacy modes in most cases, OpenFlow hardware implementations have presented problems such as standard incomplete implementations, low number of supported rules, unstable operation for full flow tables and problems in processing multiple commands