SQBRP: A Switch Quality-Based Routing Protocol for Software-Defined Networks

Nowadays, networks are facing new challenges due to the proliferation of network devices, the excessive use of bandwidth-intensive network applications, as well as the increasing demand for network quality of service. To satisfy these growing user expectations and improve network performance, an efficient network routing is needed. In order to overcome these challenges, Software Defined Networking (SDN) was designed to manage data flow and network maintenance. However, the standard SDN short-path first routing protocol (SPF) degrades network performance because it ignores the dynamic nature of the network in terms of traffic flow. In addition, there is no SDN routing solution that exploits switch states like CPU usage in the routing process. In this context, this paper proposes an SDN Routing protocol based on switch quality and residual bandwidth (SQBRP). To evaluate the performance of our protocol, we carried out several simulations. The results show that SQBRP reduces packet drop ratio as well as delays and improves throughput compared to SPF, particularly in an overloaded network.