A comparative evaluation of the performance of popular SDN controllers

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an architecture that decouples the routing intelligence from the forwarding functions, using an entity called "controller". It is paramount that the performance of the controller is thoroughly understood prior to its deployment. However, the rapid introduction of many new controllers in the research community makes it difficult to choose a suitable controller. This paper studies and evaluates the performance of several popular open source controllers such as ONOS, Ryu, Floodlight and OpenDayLight in terms of latency and throughput using an OpenFlow benchmarking tool called Cbench. Additionally, a feature-based comparison of the controllers is presented. These experimental tests provide a decision making guideline when selecting a controller.