Performance Analysis of Floodlight and Ryu SDN Controllers under Mininet Simulator

As the traditional network architecture can not meet the requirements of network users for high-quality network services, software defined network (SDN) has been proposed as a new network architecture. SDN divides the data plane and control plane in the network equipment, so that the controller can schedule the data in the network flexibly through openflow protocol. Floodlight and Ryu are two typical SDN controllers proposed for different purposes. In this paper, we first introduce Floodlight and Ryu, and then introduce the tools used in the paper: mininet and qperf. Then, we simulate the two controllers of Floodlight and Ryu, and compare their bandwidth and delay performance under different network topologies. The experimental results show that in all kinds of topology, the Floodlight controller has higher bandwidth and lower latency than Ryu controller, so the Floodlight controller has better performance.