Performance Comparison and Evaluation of Different Software Defined Networks Controllers

Abstract

In Software Defined Networking (SDN) which is a new network architecture, the controller represents the main and intelligent part of its components. Today, there exists many SDN controllers both open source and commercial including Cisco APIC, VMware NSX Controller, NEC PF6800, Beacon, Floodlight, Iris, Maestro, RunOS and others. The question is which controller can perform better in which situations. Several works were done to compare these controllers with respect to efficiency, controllers’ features, and architecture. In this paper, a Performance evaluation test of five open source controllers (libfluid, ONOS, OpenDaylight, POX and Ryu) is done, this test uses a linear topology that is built in Mininet emulator, with different number of switches. The Performance evaluation is done using Iperf and Ping commands. This paper introduces a new contribution in evaluating and comparing the End to End delay and End to End throughput responses of the five controllers while increasing the load on the linear topology and at what point of network load (number of switches) the controllers stop responding. Even though the results show that libfluid gives the best throughput performance and POX gives the best delay performance; however, the selection of the best performing controller should be based on several criteria, per the user requirements.