Analysing the Performance of Software Defined Network Controllers with Various Topologies

Software Defined Networking (SDN) physically separates the control plane from the data plane. The control plane controls forwarding devices that are centrally controlled and programmatically managed. The controller software in the control plane acts as logic for controlling the forwarding behaviour. As there are various SDN controllers available and they offer different performances with different topologies, it is required to experiment which is suitable for particular topology. This paper aims to check the performance of Ryu and POX controllers under different topologies. The topologies used in this paper are Single, Linear, Tree, Torus and Custom topologies. The experimentation is done using Mininet emulator. The performance comparison is based on the metrics such as round trip time, throughput, jitter and packet loss for both the two controllers with respect to different topologies. This paper provides an overview on how to choose a suitable controller based on the topology for the real time implementation in data centers.