Large latency of applications will bring revenue loss to cloud infrastructure providers in the cloud data center. The existing controllers of software-defined networking architecture can fetch and process traffic information in the network. Therefore, the controllers can only optimize the network latency of applications. However, the serving latency of applications is also an important factor in delivered user-experience for arrival requests. Unintelligent request routing will cause large serving latency if arrival requests are allocated to overloaded virtual machines.
To deal with the request routing problem, this paper proposes the workload-aware software-defined networking controller architecture. Then, request routing algorithms are proposed to minimize the total round trip time for every type of request by considering the congestion in the network and the workload in virtual machines (VMs). This paper finally provides the evaluation of the proposed algorithms in a simulated prototype. The simulation results show that the proposed methodology is efficient compared with the existing approaches.