ABSTRACT
This research presents the development of an improved Extended Dijkstra Algorithm (mED-SDN) for Software Defined Networks (SDN) using Representational State Transfer (REST). The original Extended Dijkstra Algorithm for SDN (ED-SDN) cannot handle shortcomings associated with the traditional shortest path routing used in SDN. The traditional shortest path routing does not take knowledge of the topology into consideration and may result in sub-optimal performance of applications and underutilization of network. The ED-SDN returns the shortest path from the single source node to every other node with the consideration of the edge weights and node weights. However, ED-SDN lacks congestion control strategies and the mechanism for computing the edge and node weights incurs significant overhead. This research presents a framework on how a load balancer can be designed in a truly RESTful manner. mED-SDN algorithm was developed using the python programming language and implemented as a component of the controller. Three different network sizes were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using latency and throughput as performance metric. The advantage of the improved approach was verified in two folds. First, this research showed that mED-SDN had a 24.3% and 12.5% improvement in terms of latency and throughput respectively when compared with ED-SDN and then demonstrated that mED-SDN gave better results in terms of latency and efficiency when compared with the existing round robin load balancing approach with a 30.6% throughput improvement.