Performance Comparison of SDN Wireless Network Under Floodlight and POX Controllers

Future networks consist of heterogenous platforms of different types. Moreover, there is a great rapid growth in mobile communication, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, and Internet of Things (IoT) communications. All of these constitute burdens on legacy networks for managing heterogeneous network devices and elements. Software Defined Network (SDN) has been introduced to overcome legacy network limitations such as scalability and compatibility. SDN decouples the control and data planes; and moves all control logics from network devices to a separate layer where all the intelligence of the network is located, which is called controller. SDN controller plays as an orchestrator to manage these different networks technologies and to cope with the continuous increase of network devices. In this paper, the performance of two types of SDN controller is studied in different situations by examining the connectivity of a mobile wireless station with a fixed wired station during the motion through cellular network. The network convergence time, connectivity, available bandwidth, delay, and jitter of the moving station as well as the packet loss during handover are collected via simulation. Different scenarios using Pox and Floodlight SDN controllers on different cellular network conditions are emulated by Mininet WiFi emulator. The scenarios covered different number of wireless stations distributed across the network model. The results show an average 0f 18% packet loss ration improvement and almost half of the jitter by using Floodlight compared to POX while POX showed much less Convergence Time.