On the Benchmarking Mainstream Open Software-Defined Networking Controllers

Abstract: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been one of the most successfull networking model over the past few years. The model decouples the network control and forwarding functions enabling the underlying infrastructure complexity to be programmed by applications. Although control plane is the cern for all the benefits, it is also the most crucial drawback of the SDN model to keep up working. Therefore, this paper presents a performance analysis on mainstream open-source SDN controllers. The results show that a well-perfomed control plane not only depends on controller throughput and response time, but also relies on topology discovery time. Our results show that Beacon controller has the highest performance on controller troughput because it uses multicore feature better than others. However, there is a few difference on topology building delay when compared to ONOS, Floodlight and OpenDaylight, which are also Java-based controllers. The worst one is Ryu for building network topology.