Performance Analysis of SDN controllers within an OpenStack infrastructure

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a promising technology to improve networking services in the cloud. The predominant features of SDN integrated with OpenStack enhances Network Virtualization. OpenStack is a novel and highly advantageous framework that serves as an IaaS in the cloud environment. There are many inbuilt SDN controllers, which can be connected to OpenStack via different plugins, but choosing among various controllers based on performance in the deployment phase is a difficult task. This paper is devoted to measuring performance and analyzing two different controllers OpenKilda and OpenDaylight and integrating them with OpenStack. All the performance is based on the requirements of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and the SDN community.The impact of increasing network size on service inside SDNs was investigated in this research. The work is mainly focused on the comparison of two well-known research-oriented SDNs controllers: ODL(OpenDaylight) and OpenKilda. Our empirical findings showed network sizes had a significant impact on SDNs controlled and supervised by ODL and OpenKilda. We analyze and measure performance based on the metrics like delay, throughput, topology change detection time, round trip time, and CPU utilization. We use the Ping tool, Cbench, and OFNet to analyze these performance vectors. Our experimental result implies that with different sets of network sizes ODL and OpenKilda had varying performance when scaled in a cloud computing environment.