A measurement of the response times of various OpenFlow/SDN controllers with CBench

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new network architecture that decouples the control plane from the data plane by adding a new entity called “controller”. Most concerns about this new networking trend are: how fast can the controller respond to data path requests and how many data path requests can a controller handle per second. To answer those concerns, this paper presents a study and evaluation of different types of OpenFlow controllers in an SDN environment. The main objective of this study is to perform a comparison between different behaviors of some popular open source SDN controllers such as Floodlight, Beacon, Pox and Ryu in terms of latency and throughput. The main results show that Floodlight is better than the other tested controllers as this paper will explain.