Design of an optimized traffic‐aware routing algorithm using integer linear programming for software‐defined networking

The number of internet users and connected devices has dramatically expanded due to the recent technological boom and the benefits that the internet of things offers to ease our lives. Network scheduling, quality of service, resource allocation, and security issues are now being addressed via software-defined networking (SDN). SDN has several benefits over traditional networks, including global centralized control, managing network traffic, and separating the forwarding and control plane. The work done in this paper aims to design and implement a traffic-aware routing framework based on routing optimization presented as an integer linear programming (ILP) to improve heterogeneous traffic flows' quality of service (QoS) in a simulated SDN environment. With the knowledge that the routing problem is a nondeterministic polynomial-time-hard problem, the proposed scheme aims to decrease the computational routing time to make the ILP-based routing system more suitable for real-time processing. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework reduces the computational time by 23% and 49% for Abilene and Goodnet topology, respectively. Additionally, with 1000 flows in the network, the suggested scheme reduces the number of network flows that violate the QoS by 9% and 22% (with Abilene topology) and 16% and 51% (with Goodnet topology) as compared to the existing shortest path delay and sway methods, respectively.