Performance Analysis of SDN Based Firewalls: POX vs. ODL

Software Defined Networking is an emerging paradigm in the field of networking that provides flexible programmability and greater control over the network functionalities. SDN’s agile policy driven network supervision is vastly superior to that of the traditional network where users had to secure every new networking conjunctions with static policies and individual dependencies. But with SDN, now it is possible to operate the network within a centralized point where the control plane is right under the fingertips of the IT personnel. With the ever evolving scene of network security, implementing newer policies are easier than ever and can be employed in minutes if not in seconds. Therefore, SDN based firewalls are becoming the focal point of many tech giants because it is the cost-effective future of network security. Therefore the primary objective of this paper is to analyse the performance of two SDN controller based firewall modules with the use of POX and OpenDaylight (ODL) controllers and the basic throughput between these two controllers within a virtual network. While the former was developed by the original pioneers of SDN, the latter is the open source project of The Linux Foundation. In this project we have used the Beryllium version of the ODL. Then we have made comparisons between the two SDN based controller’s packet transmissions through TCP and UDP and compared the data transmission rate, lost packet datagrams for different time intervals.