A Comparative Performance Analysis of Stellar SDN Controllers using Emulators

Software-defined networks initiate the era of a programmable network by segregating the control plane and data plane. It eliminates the bottleneck of programming each device manually and brace the concept of logical centralization. The primary element of the control plane is the controller where the intelligence of the entire network is implemented. There are a variety of controllers available in the market such as RYU, ODL, FloodLight, Beacon, IRIS, ONOS, OpenMUL, Mastero, POX, NOX, Libfliud, and many more. All the controllers behave differently depending on the number of nodes, topology structure, configuration environment, type of traffic flow, etc. To explore the capabilities of the controller and to measure the performance capabilities, proper comparative performance evaluation is highly demanded. So, this paper evaluates the seven widely used controllers in the market against several performance parameters such as TCP-Throughput, UDP-throughput, jitter, latency, and the number of hosts. To carry out this evaluation, research tools such as Mininet, iperf, Gnuplot have been used. At last, in-depth discussion is carried out and results are represented in the form of graphs for better analysis and understanding. Obtained results give in-depth information about the controllers performance that which controllers perform best based on the number of switches and hosts.