ABSTRACT Software‐defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing network architecture by offering incredible scalability, flexibility, and programmability. SDN's applications have expanded into various domains, including cloud computing, edge computing, enterprise networks, data centers, and the Internet of Things. One of its standout features is its ability to enhance traffic engineering. Traffic engineering involves optimizing and dynamically controlling traffic flows to reduce congestion and minimize the maximum link utilization, all while managing network traffic from a centralized point. SDN boosts overall network performance, improves user experience, and ensures that resources are used effectively. Minimizing maximum link utilization means distributing network traffic across different links or paths to make use of the most available resources and avoid congestion. This process is often referred to as load balancing or congestion minimization within the network. The primary aim is to prevent any single link from becoming overloaded. Over the years, various algorithms have been proposed to tackle this issue, but still such algorithms struggle with effectively minimizing the maximum link utilization. The proposed work achieves approximately 24% and 16% improvement in load balancing; it reduces congestion by 94% and 60% when compared to tabu search and enhanced tabu search.
U et al. (Thu,) studied this question.