Performance evaluation of centralised and distributed controllers in software defined networks

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network paradigm with a revolutionary architecture, which is based on a separation of control and data planes and intelligence centralisation in a controller. A myriad of open-source controllers have been proposed with different characteristics. In this paper, we propose a thorough performance analysis of the most commonly used controllers with regard to some network QoS parameters. As centralised controllers, we have considered POX and RYU, whereas OpenDayLight (ODL) and ONOS have been chosen as examples of distributed controllers. For small-to-medium-scale networks, simulation results show that in terms of latency, jitter, and packet loss, RYU outperforms POX, whereas POX performs better in terms of throughput and transfer. ONOS is shown to behave better than ODL concerning bandwidth, jitter, average latency, and throughput for medium-to-large network scales. However, ODL performs better in terms of packet loss.