Implementation and performance analysis of SDN firewall on POX controller

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm system in which network control plane is separated from data plane and assigned to a devoted software program called controller running at a control layer. SDN makes networks wholly controlled through software applications and gives a hope to change the limitations of current networks infrastructures. Since the emergence of SDN, it has introduced a radical change in network architecture which simplified the control of networks, but on the other hand many challenges have arisen. One of the fundamental issues which exposed due to the new architecture of SDN is the security risks. Network firewall is an essential component for securing traffic by enforcing security policies. This study aims to implement some firewall functionalities on SDN through writing some firewall applications that run on the top of the SDN POX controller. The firewall application which is working at layer2, layer3 and layer4 capable of detecting the traffic and enforcing specified rules. Our firewall filters packets based on their headers and matches them against the predefined policies. If there is matching found, the packet is blocked otherwise it is forwarded. We have selected POX a python-based SDN controller and Open vSwitch for the experiment. To create the SDN network topology, we have used VirtualBox and Mininet. Wireshark and Iperf have been used to analyze the performance of firewall module. In this study, we cover the implementation details of firewall application, experimentation result as well as providing a performance analysis of the firewall module.