A Concise Queuing Model for Controller Performance in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is commonly seen as a promising waytowards future Internet. Understanding the performance and limitation ofits logically centralized controllers is a prerequisite of SDNdeployments. For this end, this paper proposes a concise queuing modelfor SDN controller performance. We first investigate that the input of aSDN controller is a hybrid Poisson stream of packet-in messages. Then,we analyze the message processing of a SDN controller to achieve aconcise queuing model M/M/1 for its performance, and further derive itsperformance parameters from queuing theory. Finally, our proposed modelis evaluated by measuring a well-known controller with the benchmarkCbench. Experimental results indicate that our model is a betterapproximation of the controller performance than the existing ones.