Comparative Simulation of TCP and TLS Protocols in SDN Network

To ease the manageability of networks in a cloud data center, most Cloud Service Providers (CSP) are leveraging Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN separates the control and data plane fused in traditional networks, thus increasing flexibility in process management. In the quest to unravel the behavior of packet transmission in SDN, previous researchers have modeled SDN networks using the queueing approach, with more attention given to packet-level transmission. Furthermore, more attention has been given to the simulation of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic. In this study, a Transport Layer Security (TLS) model within SDN has been proposed. In modeling the TLS protocol, a joint single controller to switch queueing approach has been employed state to derive the equilibrium state probabilities, handshake delay, and packet drop rate. The simulation comparison with the TCP model was then conducted. The results show that though the SDN network can gain security from TLS, it has an added average handshake delay of approximately 40% and a higher packet drop probability.