OpenFlow versus commercial load balancers in a Campus Network

Ashkan Ghaffarinejad, Violet Syrotiuk

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The production network at Arizona State University uses a commercial load balancer for syslog messages from the firewalls at the data center perimeter. The logs are carried in UDP packets and the load balancer divides the load among servers based on the source IP address. This may cause a server to be overwhelmed due to the high incoming data rate, and create log files unequal in size. These logs are processed by splunk, an application for analyzing the massive streams of data generated by IT systems. In a testbed with an OpenFlow switch and three rsyslog servers, fed by a mirror of the firewall syslog traffic, we study controllers implementing round-robin, random, and load-based load balancing policies. All policies achieve delivery ratios comparable with the commercial load balancer. When servers fail or go down for maintenance, the load-based policy produces log files the most balanced in size. The results suggest that an OpenFlow load balancer has performance competitive with a commercial load balancer, and can equalize the log file size at servers which improves the efficiency of splunk.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2015 IEEE 82nd Vehicular Technology Conference, VTC Fall 2015 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781479980918
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 25 2016
Event82nd IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, VTC Fall 2015 - Boston, United States
Duration: Sep 6 2015Sep 9 2015

Other

Other82nd IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, VTC Fall 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period9/6/159/9/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Automotive Engineering
  • Hardware and Architecture

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