Performance Evaluation of SDN Controllers in Ofnet Emulation Environment

Ever since the Software Defined Networking (SDN) was introduced, it has led into the discovery of several controllers, which have been consistently improved by researchers to overcome many constraints. For the fact that there are many types of controllers in SDN it was necessary to find out which controller has the best performance. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive compression discussion about floodlight and OpenDaylight controller in the literature. The aim of this research is to evaluate two different types of a controller named Floodlight and OpenDaylight according to various parameters. The compression based on various parameters such as new flow generation, average setup latency, open flow massages to/from the controller, flow misses to the controller and Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilization in the Ofnet platform program. It was found that the floodlight controller is outperforming the OpenDaylight controller in small occupying memory size and less CPU utilization. Furthermore, it contains a less number of messages in packages, and the new flow generation is static. However, the OpenDaylight controller is outperforming the floodlight controller in average setup latency.