Dynamic Bandwidth-Aware Link Aggregation Control Algorithm for Self-Hosted Learning Management Systems Data Center

Online learning management systems (LMS) rely heavily on consistent network connectivity to meet the ever-changing demands for its resources. Ensuring the availability of sufficient bandwidth is particularly important but challenging for self-hosted LMS, which is characterized by varying bandwidth requirement. Many self-hosted systems are fraught with low bandwidth and hence deliver poor-quality service to end users. The various interventions for addressing bandwidth wear-outs in high traffic networks are rather expensive, and inefficient for self-hosted systems as they result in link redundancy. Therefore, this study proposes a framework that uses software-defined networking (SDN)-based Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to allocate network bandwidth according to the dynamic traffic demands of the LMS application. The dynamic bandwidth-aware LACP algorithm monitors and analyzes traffic on the LMS at regular time intervals and assigns network bandwidth in response, accommodating the bandwidth needed for the specific instance. The system is simulated for a two-LAG and four-LAG setups using the SDN Ryu controller. The result of the simulation shows an efficient bandwidth assignment according to the dynamic traffic requirements of the LMS. In all, an average bandwidth of 11,900.4 Mbps was recorded for all user datagram protocol streams, amounting to about 60.5% improvement in bandwidth reservation compared to 7,413.33 Mbps recorded in a static LACP implementation. Also, the system demonstrates a quick recovery by adjusting and re-assigning link bandwidth when one or two links are down. However, the result also shows a weakness of the Ryu controller to efficiently assign and utilize bandwidth as the number of aggregated links increases, resulting in increased packet retransmission rates. This suggests that the number of links aggregated into a LAG should be carefully selected according to the SDN controller’s ability to fully utilize them.