Traditional network load balancers have been developed and deployed by combining software and hardware into network devices. This approach makes load balancers inflexible, and hard to perform network management tasks, expensive, and with a limited number of schedules discipline implemented. Software Defined Networking - SDN is a promising network paradigm that proposes a separation of software-hardware from devices (vertical integration), enable programmability to network, generalize network devices and functions and centralize network management tasks. Those ideas can be apply to the development of new SDN load balancers to overlap the disadvantages of traditional load balancers. So, this work evaluated the performance of SDN load balancers implementations with different schedule disciplines (Random, Round-Robin and CPU Usage), besides the reactive and active SDN load balancers. We focus on Web server technology to evaluate the impact of a SDN load balancer on the response time requests. Furthermore, we used a restricted network architecture established in literature to execute the experiments.
Through careful performance evaluation based on collected data and the reviewed literature, we concluded that SDN load balancers implementations
are rvealry effective, viable, flexible and inexpensive solutions to distributed the load for Web servers requests.