SDN Controllers Comparison Based On Network Topology

The rapid growth of web applications requires an intelligent network architecture that enables efficient and dynamic network configuration to improve its management, security, and performance. One solution to this problem is Software Defined Network (SDN) stack, which allows programmable configuration for the network. Decoupling the data plane (packet forwarding) from the control plane (routing process) in the standard TCP/IP networks depicts the basic idea of SDN. The main component of the SDN is called a controller. Various controllers can work on SDN, e.g., Floodlight, Open Day Light, RYU, and POX. Controllers perform best depending on the application running because each application can have different requirements from other applications. In this paper, we compare the POX and RYU controllers in terms of their impact on SDN performance. We chose these two controllers, first, because they are open-source and commonly used for SDN network performance studies, and second, because they use a clean and convenient python based configuration environment. We used the open-source emulator Mininet to conduct our experiments on various network topologies. We find that the RYU controller outperforms the POX in most simulated scenarios.