An enhanced HFPA‐IHS‐ORP‐based optimization mechanism for efficient bandwidth allocation in software‐defined networks.

Summary: Nowadays, due to the increased amount of network users and resources, some emerging technologies like big data and cloud have been developed. But managing these types of networks is more complex; in order to solve this issue, a software‐defined network (SDN) is developed for managing the network in a comfortable manner, in which maintaining load balance and energy efficiency of network is highly important to satisfy the requirements of quality of service (QoS). For these reasons, various optimization‐based algorithms are developed in the traditional works, but these lack with the limitations of increased network traffic and energy consumption. In order to solve these issues, an enhanced hybrid flower pollination algorithm (HFPA) with improved harmony search (IHS) is developed in this paper. It intends to obtain an improved resource utilization and reduced network load and delay by efficiently allocating the bandwidth to the network. Moreover, an optimal routing protocol (ORP) is employed to perform the data transmission with condensed network traffic. During experimentation, the performance results of the proposed algorithm are examined and compared with some traditional methodologies. From the results, it is noted that the proposed HFPA‐IHS‐ORP provides the better results than the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]