Performance evaluation of sdn controllers: Floodlight and OpenDaylight

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture. One of its components is the controller, which is the intelligent part of SDN. Many controllers such as Floodlight, OpenDaylight, Maestro, NOX, POX, and others have been released. The question is which controller can perform better in which situations. Many works have been done to compare these controllers with respect to architecture, efficiency, and controllers' features. In this paper, an evaluation based on some network QoS parameters is done. Two of the most popular controllers, Floodlight and OpenDaylight are compared in terms of delay and loss in different topologies and network loads. This paper can help researchers to choose the best controller in different use cases such as clouds and multimedia. The results, with a 95% confidence interval, show that OpenDaylight outperforms Floodlight in low loaded networks and also for tree topologies in midloaded networks in terms of latency. Floodlight can outperform OpenDaylight in heavily loaded networks for tree topologies in terms of packet loss, and in linear topologies in terms of latency. There is no significant difference in performance of Floodlight and OpenDaylight controllers in other cases.