ERA: Efficient Request Assignment for Servers in Data Center Networks with SDN

Software-defined networking (SDN) can facilitate network management by using a controller to monitor the network and instruct switches. It receives attention to manage a data center network (DCN) with multiple servers using SDN. In the paper, we propose an efficient request assignment (ERA) scheme to allocate requests sent from clients to the servers in an SDN-based DCN. For each request, ERA first finds candidate servers with sufficient resources and grades them. The calculation of grades considers the load degree, processing delay, and resource utilization of each server. Based on its grade, ERA picks a suitable server to handle the request, which can achieve load balance among servers and save time responding to requests. Through simulations, we show that the ERA scheme can efficiently improve the connection rate, response time, and resource utilization of servers.