SDN controllers: A comparative study

The control plane is an essential part of the SDN architecture, so it is very important to give proper attention to any proposal or design of an SDN controller. During the past few years, several controllers have been developed and several studies have been done to evaluate, compare and test the performance of these controllers. In this paper, new controllers are tested, such as ONOS and Libfluid-based controllers (raw, base), using Cbench, an OpenFlow testing tool. Even though the results show that MUL, Beacon, and Maestro (in latency mode) are the best performing controllers; however, the selection of the best-fitted controller should be based on several criteria, per user requirements.