In Production Performance Testing of SDN Control Plane for Telecom Operators

One of the biggest emerging challenges for telco operators is to dynamically create new services while maintaining the network at its optimal performance/revenue break point. To this end, operators are moving to a much leaner cloud-based Software Defined Network (SDN) infrastructure to achieve a truly programmable network fabric. While cloud services can be provisioned in seconds and tested in-production, service provisioning in SDNs still lasts many weeks and requires substantial manual effort. A large part of this service creation time can be attributed to testing and tuning the control plane. In this paper we present SCP-CLUB (SDN Control Plane CLoUd-based Benchmarking), a platform for in-production performance testing of telco operator SDNs, offering a level of automation as available in deploying cloud services. Telco cloud SDN performance testing with SCP-CLUB focuses on the analysis of how design choices in the cloud and SDN control planes influence SLA metrics like throughput and latency. We describe the SCP-CLUB architecture and its performance testing support capabilities. Experiments are performed on an SDN telco cloud built to demonstrate SCP-CLUB under production load conditions.