Analysis of Impact of Network Topologies on Network Performance in SDN

Abstract

As compared to traditional networks, software-defined networks (SDNs) have made the communication process more flexible, dynamic, and agile employing its unique features such as centralized control, direct programmability, and physical separation of the network control plane from the forwarding plane or data plane. As the control plane has control over several devices, the process of separation and controlling different devices has made SDN different from the traditional networks. Communication is a vital part of any network. To obtain the best communication results in an SDN, it is essential to analyze and evaluate the performance of different topologies being used. It would be interesting to find out which of these topologies can be used in SDN environment to establish the best communication and to obtain better results if not the best. In this paper, we propose to find out the best topology among four possible topologies in SDN through simulation in Mininet. This selection of best topology is based upon the evaluation and analysis of various network parameters such as throughput, round-trip time, end-to-end delay, bandwidth, and packet loss with/without link down. Based on the values of these parameters through our limited experiments for this paper, we identify the topologies that provide the best and the worst communication results in SDN. Four different types of topologies have been shown to be simulated through Mininet and Wireshark for SDN for the purpose of comparison of this performance analysis.