Design and Deployment of a Dynamic Weighted Round-Robin SDN Load Balancing Mechanism with Distributed Controllers
Received: 16 June 2025 | Revised: 18 September 2025 and 15 October 2025 | Accepted: 18 October 2025 | Online: 8 December 2025
Corresponding author: M. Shona
Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) represents an innovative paradigm in network design that improves manageability, scalability, and adaptability. Within SDN, load balancing serves as a key component in optimizing network performance. SDN relying on a single centralized controller can lead to performance issues, especially under high traffic or excessive requests. To address this challenge, this study introduces an improved SDN load balancer that uses a Dynamic Weighted Round Robin algorithm with Distributed Controller (DWRR-DC), implemented using the Ryu controller. The proposed algorithm was implemented along with some existing load balancing methods, such as Random Selection (RS), Round Robin (RR), Least Time Weighted Round Robin (LTWRR), Weighted Round Robin (WRR), and Dynamic Weighted Random Selection (DWRS), emulated using the Mininet platform with a huge volume of simulated network traffic. Their performance was analyzed with respect to throughput and packet loss percentage, and the results were compared. The response time of the proposed and existing algorithms was also compared using the generated HTTP requests. Finally, the optimal number of controllers for the proposed algorithm was also obtained.
Keywords:
dynamic load balancing, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Ryu controller, MininetDownloads
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