PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SDN CONTROLLERS: ANALYSING THE TCP TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT IN POX, RYU, AND ODL

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm that separates the data and the control plane. The controller is one of SDN's leading entities that controls the information flow in the network. Therefore, the research deals with a thorough performance differentiation of three prominent SDN controllers: POX, Ryu, and OpenDaylight (ODL). The study aims to evaluate these controllers' effectiveness in controlling the network traffic by focusing on performance parameters such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) mean, packet loss, and jitter. The experimental setup employed Mininet, a network emulator, to create a consistent virtual network environment for all controllers. Each controller was tested in isolated virtual machines, ensuring controlled and unbiased results. The experimental results reveal distinct performance differences among the controllers. In the research experimentations, the highest TCP mean throughput and superior performance among all controllers are achieved by ODL consistently, and minimum loss of the data packets and jitter is observed across all-time instances for high-demand, large-scale networks. This study shows that choosing the right SDN controller is crucial as it depends on particular network requirements to guide network administrators and researchers when choosing the SDN controller best for their network.