Recent Research have shown that software-defined networking (SDN) drastically improves network resource utilization, manages today's complex networks and reduces cost. The rapid development of technology and the explosively growing information services as well as the increasing number of users, have made the load distribution a huge issue that could eventually impact the network's performance and its quality of service. The need for SDN comes from the load-balancing problematic which could reduce the availability of network applications, resource utilization and QoS indicators such as latency, throughput and response time. In this paper, we analyze the impact of software-defined networks design and the architecture of its control plane on the load-balancing methods efficiency. We present a detailed analysis of some load-balancing algorithms and metrics in centralized and distributed SDN architectures. We also introduce some of the load-balancing mechanisms applied in 5G networks in particular.
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