An ACO-based Link Load-Balancing Algorithm in SDN

Software Defined Networking is a novel network architecture, which separates data and control plane by OpenFlow. The feature of centralized control to acquire and allocate of global network resource. So, the link load-balancing of SDN is not as difficult as the traditional network. This paper proposes a link load-balancing algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization(LLBACO). The algorithm uses the search rule of ACO and takes link load, delay and pack-loss as impact factors that ants select next node. For maintaining link load-balancing and reducing end-to-end transmission delay, the widest and shortest path in the all paths can be gained by ants. The results of simulations show that LLBACO can balance the link load of network effectively, improve the Quality of Service(QoS) and decrease network overhead, compared with existing algorithm.