Title: Performance evaluation of centralised and distributed controllers in software defined networks

Authors: Houda Hassen; Soumaya Meherzi

Addresses: RISC Laboratory, National Engineering School of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia ' RISC Laboratory, National Engineering School of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia

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.

Keywords: SDN controller; POX; RYU; OpenDayLight; ONOS; performance parameters.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2024.140272

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2024 Vol.27 No.2, pp.103 - 117

Received: 07 Feb 2023
Accepted: 27 Jul 2023
Published online: 01 Aug 2024 *

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