Behavior of NAPT Middleware in an SDN Environment

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a novel concept that aims to achieve flexibility and scalability by decoupling control and data plane and imbuing centralized control, while leveraging routing overlay and connection oriented technologies. Another concept, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) focuses on virtualization of network devices that allows implementation of virtual middleware, such as intrusion detection system (IDS), Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT), Load Balancer etc. In this project our goal was to examine the performance of an SDN based network where it is integrated with a middleware NAPT. The NAPT was implemented using the Click Modular Router within a virtual platform Mininet. A POX controller was used for NFV and SDN integration and this simulated client-server network's performance was evaluated for different Bandwidth of UDP datagrams. Our tests showed that the inclusion of a middleware resulted delayed packet delivery period and incurred deterioration in packet delivery ratio.