Performance Evaluation of Openflow SDN Controllers

Abstract

Software Defined Networks (SDN) is the recent networking paradigm being adopted by stakeholders in big way. The concept works towards dramatically reducing network deployment and management costs. Controllers, also known as Network Operating System of SDN, are critical to success of SDNs. Many open source controllers are available for use. In this paper, performance of four popular Openflow based controllers has been evaluated on various metrics. Latency, Bandwidth utilization, Packet Transmission rate, Jitter and Packet loss has been calculated for TCP and UDP traffic on varying network sizes, topologies and Controllers. Floodlight is one of the best performing as compared to reference controller.