A Survey on Load Balancing Methods in Software Defined Network

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel network architecture which has received much attention in recent years. SDN is an architecture designed for improving and simplifying network management with high flexibility by separating control plane and data plane. Thus, programmability of the network is enhanced which in turn leads to more innovation opportunities. The separating of concerns introduced between the definition of network policies, their implementation in switching hardware, and forwarding of traffic are the main keys to the desired flexibility: by breaking the network control problem into tractable pieces, SDN makes it easier to create and introduce new abstractions in networking, simplifying of the network management and facilitating network evolution. Since Load Balancing service is essential to service for distributing workload across server farms or data centers, this paper has summarized and categorized Load Balancing methods in SDN. Many load balancing strategies based on SDN have been suggested to improve the performance of the networks. So, despite expressing of proposed methods, this paper also analyzes their advantages and disadvantage and will promote the SDN development and provide a guidance and comprehensive study for other researchers in this field who want to propose a new method of Load Balancing.