Evaluation of TCP and UDP Traffic over Software-Defined Networking

In Software-Defined Networking (SDN), the decoupling of control and data planes brings advantages in terms of logically centralized control and application programming. This paper presents an analysis of the SDN traffic flow based on the transmission control protocol (TCP) and the user datagram protocol (UDP) generated from source host to the destination host over SDN infrastructure. For system evaluation, the Mininet Emulator is used to build the SDN infrastructure, the Network Performance Measurement Tool (iPerf) to generate the traffic according to the specified command-line options, and the Wireshark packet analyzer analyzes the protocol especially TCP and UDP. The analysis shows throughput and packet loss in three network topologies: single, linear, and custom tree topology. According to the evaluation results, the throughput of TCP falls off dramatically during the retransmission sequence. In the evaluation of UDP traffic, the single topology can handle the packet loss, the linear topology can take place 10 ~ 30 % packet loss and the custom tree topology can only occur a negligible amount of packet loss in two testing environments.