Elastic Load Balancing in Software Defined Satellite Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a key technology for enabling satellite networks and, more specifically, their Ground Segment Network (GSN), with innovative services. The most important entity of the SDN architecture is the controller that enables network programmability. In this paper, we present the design and development of a new SDN controller for the GSN. The core of the controller is a new application for handling the traffic load over the GSN links and, in case of failures, for automatically rerouting traffic flows. We also propose an elastic load balancing policy that leverages on a parametric approach for assigning the cost to the GSN links thus allowing network administrators to adjust the links load by establishing a threshold between consolidation and balancing. To assess the effectiveness of our load control policy, we carried out experimental tests using the Mininet emulation environment.