An OpenFlow-Based Elephant-Flow Monitoring and Scheduling Strategy in SDN
Qinghui Chen, Mingyang Chen, Hong Wen, Yazhi Shi · Electronics · 2025
This paper introduces a novel monitoring and scheduling strategy based on software-defined networking (SDN) to address the challenges of elephant flow scheduling and localization in conventional networks. The plan involves collecting and analyzing switch data, effectively monitoring elephant flows, and enhancing the traditional distributed solution. Meanwhile, elephant flow scenarios are simulated by the iperf tool, and Fat-Tree and Leaf-Spine topologies are simulated in Mininet. Experimental results demonstrate significant network stability and resource utilization improvements with the proposed strategy. Specifically, in the Leaf-Spine topology, the network throughput stabilized around 8 Mbps with minimal fluctuation and no congestion over a 120-s test, compared to multiple throughput drops to 0 Mbps under the Fat-Tree topology. In addition, the proposed scheduling approach takes advantage of monitoring and scheduling for elephant flow, a promising scheme to enhance traffic management efficiency in large-scale network environments.