LOAD BALANCING EMULATION IN SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKS USING MININET

The problem of testing a programmed behavior of the software-defined network controller has been examined in this article. Since testing the behavior of the controller is often impossible to test on the real network, the emulation of software-defined networks has been examined, as well as compatibility with a real SDN-controller. Possibilities of extending the functionality of SDN-controller has been analyzed. The ability of a POX SDN-controller to work with emulated networks has been utilized to set up load balancing in an emulated software-defined network with a star topology. An experiment with a strategy of load balancing, which was defined programmatically, has been conducted using Mininet emulator together with the Miniedit GUI. The strategy of load balancing in SDN has been programmed on the controller side without changing the network configuration. The results of the experiment have been presented. Conclusions on the future work, which will be dedicated to more complex algorithms, that can be tested using the suggested approach, has been made.