An Expermental Study on Load Balancing for a Software Defined Network based Virtualized Network Functions Platform

Network functionalities in conventional computer networks have been facilitated by implementing hardware middle-boxes. However, with the introduction of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) technologies, Cloud Service providers (CSPs) are able to offer VNFs as services to clients, along with general virtualized applications. CSPs provision and allocate resources to the VNFs, as required by the clients. An efficient cloud resource management approach plays an important role, in terms of continuing a successful CSP business model. To meet client Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Quality of Service (QoS), CSP is required to ensure that the virtualized entities are not overloaded with the processing, and workload is divided among virtualized entities adequately. Therefore, load balancing plays an important role, when offering VNFs as services to clients. This research focuses on exploring a load balancing algorithm for a cloud platform where VNFs are offered as a service. As the initial stage, we have used Weighted Round-Robin and Least Connection approaches and conducted an experimental study to compare the performances of the two approaches. Our results show that the weighted round robin algorithm performs better in terms of the workload distribution and average response time.